It's For You, Castle
by WRTRD
Summary: Beckett is suddenly writing letters, and so is Castle. Complete.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

The first time it happens is on a cold, rainy November night when Castle's on a business trip. He always stays in this hotel in Chicago because you can request a pet goldfish in your room, and it makes him a little less lonely. He always names the fish Wacker, because the hotel is on Wacker Drive, and although it's statistically all but impossible that this Wacker is the same Wacker as last time, he feels oddly comforted as he watches the little guy swimming around.

It's past midnight. He's exhausted after a day of interviews and meetings and glad-handing and a two-hour book signing. He misses Beckett. Misses their bed. Misses Beckett in their bed. He yawns as he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror and unzips his shaving kit. That's when he finds it: a piece of paper wrapped neatly around the handle of his toothbrush. After unfurling it and smoothing it out on the marble countertop, he decides to take it to the bedroom. He doesn't want to get water on it and he doesn't want to read it standing up. It's from his favorite detective; it deserves his total attention. She could have used the computer and printed it out; that would've been easier, but it would have diminished it. He can see her hand moving across the page, imagines her stopping and pushing the top of the pen against her upper lip while she thinks, then dropping her head back down and writing again. He considers sitting in the desk chair, but the bed is so much more inviting. He stretches out, holding the pale gray paper with both hands because it's still trying to curl in on itself.

"Have I ever told you that I love your teeth? Everyone has perfect teeth now, and it's awful. They're bleached so they look as if they're ceramic. They're straight and square and boring because everyone gets braces, even if they're middle-aged. Your teeth are beautiful because they're slightly imperfect. Your top teeth really are perfect, but the bottom ones, the four in front, are a bit crooked, and they make my heart stop. Or go faster. It depends.

"I noticed them the day we met. I wanted to kill you, you were so cocky. You were so gorgeous, too, and you knew it. But once when you smiled I could just see that little crowded, overlapping quartet, and I thought aha, finally, the flaw. It didn't matter that the flaw was so insignificant; I wondered if you were self-conscious about it.

"I love it when you nibble on me or nip me, little bites and licks. But sometimes when I run my tongue over your lips to get you to open for me, I want to tell you to wait a minute, don't open up wide yet, just let me feel those bottom incisors. They're rough against me, as though they could be a little dangerous. It's incredibly sexy.

"Go brush your teeth now and get into bed and say goodnight to Wacker! And think of me running the tip of my finger or the tip my tongue over your bottom teeth."

In the morning he stops at a stationery store across the street, buys a laminated folder that snaps shut, and puts the note inside. He can't stop smiling, so broadly that his dangerously sexy incisors are probably showing.

The next time it happens he's at home writing. It's the middle of a dreary January afternoon, and he's flagging. He wants something to eat, but doesn't know what, so he wanders into the kitchen and looks in the fridge. He doesn't even have to poke around because he finds what he wants immediately: it's in a small white box that's inside a doggy bag from the restaurant where they'd had dinner last night. Beckett had ordered creme brûlée but declared herself full after two spoonfuls. No way he was letting it go to waste, but he had his own dessert—chocolate mousse—so he asked the waiter to wrap up hers and they'd brought it home. She won't mind, will she? If he eats it? She surrendered her rights to it when she didn't finish it. She'd have left it there if he hadn't rescued it, so technically it's his. Good. He pulls the bag out of the fridge, grabs a plate and a spoon, and carries everything back to his office.

There's something taped to the top of the box. An envelope, unmarked. He peels it off, opens the flap, and draws out a piece—two pieces—of folded paper. It's from Beckett. The pale gray stationery again, covered in her handwriting.

"You're asleep, Castle. You'd think all that chocolate you ate would keep you up, but no. I had designs on you, all kinds of designs, but you conked out. I'm betting that you have designs on this creme brûlée. Am I right? I'm also betting that it's about four in the afternoon, your internal snack alarm has gone off, and you found this custardy delight straight off.

"Did you know that when we're eating at home you always finish what's on my plate? I know it's unconscious, and I wonder if it started when Alexis was little? I can picture the two of you in the kitchen, with you doing everything you can to get her to try a green bean or some chicken or a slice of mango. Smacking your lips, telling her how yummy it is as you take a bite, making her laugh. And now you eat what's on my plate. Your arm just appears and you're not even looking at it. You're talking to me, and it's as if the hand belongs to someone else, who spears the chunk of sweet potato or the mushroom or the stalk of asparagus and puts the fork in your mouth. You're big bird and baby bird, all in one.

"It should drive me nuts, but it doesn't. I want to laugh or grab the fork when it's halfway there. The weird thing is that you don't do it when other people are at the table, even if it's just Alexis or your mother. Some part of your brain censors it. After you read this you'll stop doing it for a while, be embarrassed. But I know that you'll start again without being aware of it; I wouldn't have told you if I weren't sure. It means that you're completely committed to me, and crazy as it may sound, I find it incredibly intimate. It makes me think of a really old couple I saw in the park one morning when I was out for a run. They were sitting on a bench with their take-out cups, had to be in their late 80s, and I stopped to watch them. There was a trickle of coffee on his chin and she took a hanky out of her coat pocket and dabbed it off. And then she ran her palm over his cheek and left it there. He looked at her with such love, and he took her hand and wrapped his own around it and kissed her. And they just sat serenely for a long time. I was getting cold, so I started to run again, and when I passed them they were still holding hands and they smiled at me.

"I want that to be us, a long time from now."

He opens his desk drawer, pulls the laminated folder out from the bottom, unsnaps it, and carefully places the note on top of the one that he'd found two months before, wrapped around his toothbrush in a Chicago hotel.

The third time it happens is in February, when he opens the lid of his laptop and discovers an envelope lying on the keyboard. He sees the gray stationery and feel his heart race accelerate. Two piece of papers again.

"We never dated. We went from zero to sixty in half a minute. From sixty to a hundred a minute after that. Well, okay, we were stuck on zero for more than three years, but what I'm getting at is that we didn't really know much about each other before we got together. We knew a lot—in some ways knew each other inside out—but not all the little things that most people find out while they're dating. Bits of you and bits of me. I want us to know all of them. These are some bits of me, in no particular order.

"My first grade teacher was Mrs. Reilly, who always wore a scarf. She might have had a birthmark on her neck and wanted to cover it up. I thought she was a goddess.

"I gave my first boyfriend Brut after shave for Christmas. I thought it was sophisticated. He had found his first two whiskers and insisted on shaving at least one a week. We were in eighth grade.

"The day after my mother's funeral I went to a bar with a fake ID and picked up some disgusting guy who took me out to his car. I threw up four vodka stingers all over the front seat before he could get my sweater off, thank God, and he left me in the parking lot. This is not a happy or noble memory, but it's something I think you should know.

"I always hated Barbie dolls. I couldn't understand why her feet had to be the way they were, so that she had to spend her entire life on tiptoe or in high heels. I'd probably kill for some of her shoes now, though, if they come in my size.

"The first book that I fell in love with was _Number the Stars_ , when I was nine. It's about a Danish girl and her family in World War Two who try to help their Jewish friends get away. The first book of yours that I read was _In a Hail of Bullets_ , which I took from my mother's nightstand one summer morning and returned in the afternoon before she could know that it was missing. Yes, I read it one sitting. Yes, I swooned over the author's photo. Early adolescent hormones, Castle.

"My favorite basic swear word is fuck, which you almost certainly realized a while ago, but if you want to know my favorite nontraditional one, you'll have to tickle it out of me. And when you do, it will be a very, very happy memory."

He puts that note in with the other two, closes the laminated folder and sits with it, on his lap, for a long time before he slips it back into the drawer.

The fourth time it happens is on the first warm weekend in spring. They had driven out to the Hamptons on the spur of the moment last night, stopping for dinner on the way. This morning Beckett wanted to take an early run on the beach, and he said he'd drive into town to get groceries, or at least something for breakfast. When he opens the car door, he spies the now very familiar, much beloved pale gray envelope propped up on the steering wheel. He decides to read the note while he's in the driver's seat. It's very short, less than a full page.

"You've never told me about the scar on your forehead, and I often wonder about it. I'm guessing that it dates to your childhood. If a school yard bully caused it, I'd hunt him down. Is he a fat self-satisfied banker, a sleaze, a lieabout? Whoever he is, I'd go so full-out, badass Beckett on him that he'd be pleading to do 5,000 hours of community service if I'd just leave him alone. I don't want that scar to be the visible reminder of something traumatic, I want it to be the result of some dopey thing you did as a kid. You built a space ship and ran into the antenna that you'd made out of a hanger, something like that.

"I notice it most it when I'm on top of you. When you're sweaty and your skin is all flushed, the scar really stands out. Sometimes when you're asleep I let my hand hover over your forehead, and then I lower it to cover the scar. I don't want you to tell me how you got it. This is one thing I like not knowing, unless it was something really monstrous, or frightening. If that's why you haven't told me, I want you to do it now. Please, Castle. I don't want to you have to keep living with that alone."

The laminated folder is at the loft, so he returns the paper to the envelope and shuts it in the glove compartment. He goes into town and gets some strawberries, which were obviously flown in from somewhere to the south, milk, juice, bagels, and cream cheese. When he's waiting in line at the market, he's surprised to find himself running the pad of his index finger over his scar.

By the time he gets home, Beckett is already in the kitchen, making coffee. He sets the grocery bag on the counter and kisses the back of her neck.

"Is the coffee ready?"

"Yup." She smiles and puts a mug in his hand.

Before she can move away, he puts his hand around her waist. "Ice hockey."

She looks completely baffled. "What?"

"My scar. I got it playing ice hockey when I was eleven."

Bafflement has been transformed into astonishment. "And you didn't tell me? Why not?"

He lets go of her hand. "Can we go sit down? Much more comfy."

"Sure." Now she looks worried. "Is the story that awful?"

He shakes his head and pulls her down onto the sofa with him. "Not awful at all. That year all my friends were playing ice hockey so I had to, too. I was terrible at it. Way beyond bad. I got the scar after I tried, without success, to steal the puck. I slid into the goal post and hit my head on it. When I was getting to my feet I knocked my helmet halfway off and stepped on my own hockey stick which smacked me on the forehead. It looked a lot worse than it was because there was blood everywhere. Bobby Michaels fainted." He's laughing. "I stopped playing that day."

"Because you were afraid. Pretty scary accident, Castle." She looks hard at him. "You're lucky it wasn't a lot worse. You could have taken out your eye."

"That's not why. I quit because I was just terrible at it. I was bad at sports and it took that to make me realize that I'd have to find a way to be accepted that didn't involve physical coordination. That's when I found out I was funny, and it saved me."

She draws her legs up and turns so that she's at a right angle to him, her knees pressed against his thigh. "Guys always like to catalogue their scars, Castle. Tell their war stories, even if they embroider them. I don't understand why you never told me about this? You've talked about all the others and this one doesn't seem to haunt you. You laughed about it just now. So how come?"

"It's stupid."

"I doubt it. You're the least stupid person I know."

"You."

"Me? What?"

"I didn't tell you about it because of you. You are a phenomenal athlete, Beckett. I knew it the first day I saw you, the way you carried yourself, the way you moved. You excel at every sport you try, so my abject failure at any of them is embarrassing."

She leans in to him, so close now that he can feel her breath on his ear. "You can run like hell when you want to, Castle. When you're motivated. I've seen you."

"Running doesn't require coordination."

"And your muscles, God almighty. Your chest," she puts a hand on his bicep, "and your arms, which you know are a huge, and I emphasize huge, turn on for me."

"Well, lifting weights doesn't require a lot of coordination, either, just a good trainer and a good spotter. I might have gone a little overboard there. I think your Doctor Burke would diagnosis it as overcompensation." He smiles. "I told you it was stupid. I love that you're so athletic, it makes sex so—"

"Shut up, Castle," she says, resting her forehead against his forearm and chuckling. "I can't believe that's what it was. All this time I've been worried, or romanticizing it."

He tips her chin up. "Your turn, Kate."

"My turn? You know everything about every one of my scars."

"Not what I'm talking about. You know I got the fourth letter this morning, since we've been talking about the ding in my forehead. And the other three times? All I ever did was say thank you. Didn't you wonder why?"

She mumbles into his arm. "Maybe a little."

"Only a little?"

"Okay, a lot." She straightens up. "Why didn't you?"

"I was so happy. And touched, and flattered, and overcome. I saved them, you know."

"You did?" She looks like a little girl when she says that. As though she's shocked that he hadn't tossed them out as soon as he's read them.

"Yeah, in a laminated folder with a clasp. I got it the morning after the first one, in Chicago. I keep them in my desk drawer and I've read them so often I might have to get them laminated, too, before they fall apart."

"How come you never asked, then?"

"I think I was afraid you'd stop writing them."

" _Really_?"

"Really." He runs his hand to the back of her head and pulls the elastic out of her ponytail to let her hair loose.

"Then why did you talk about this one?"

"Because you were worried and I didn't want you to be. Because I'm fine. As fine as I've ever been in my life. Finer. And now I'm going to ask, because much as I didn't want you to stop, I was dying to know, am dying to know, why you wrote them."

"Nikki."

"Nikki? As in Heat?"

"You know any other Nikkis, Castle?" She pinches his thigh. "Should I be worried about another woman?"

"No. You're my one and only. Well, you and Nikki, but you're kind of the same person. Partly. Don't pinch me again."

"Okay. You've written tons of books. I wrote those notes because you wrote Nikki. Write Nikki. You write books for me, Castle. This is my insubstantial way of saying thank you. For changing my life and for sticking with me and being in love with me. You write for everyone, in a way. Everyone who reads your books, even if you're not exactly thinking of them when you do. So that why I wrote what I did: in case no one's ever written anything for you."

He's quiet for such a long time that she's nervous. Finally she asks, "Castle? Rick?" She thought that she'd seen everything there could be in his eyes, but she's never seen this. It's soft and intense and consuming.

"Are you hungry, Kate?"

"Sort of."

"Can you wait a while for breakfast?"

"Sure, but—is there a reason?"

"Yes. Because no. No one had ever written anything for me until you did. And I want to go to bed with you right now. I want to take all your clothes off you and I want you to run your tongue against my teeth. I want you to lie on top of me when we're both slick and sweaty, and not have you pay any attention to the scar on my forehead. I want to make you come four times, once for each of your perfect letters. And then I want to have breakfast in bed with you and eat off your plate when you don't finish your bagel, and dab a trickle of coffee off your chin. I want you to tell me all about _Number the Stars_ and your first-grade teacher Mrs. Reilly and your eighth-grade boyfriend who smelled of Brut. And then I want to crush you against my chest and have you tell me what you liked best about _In a Hail of Bullets_ and I want to tickle you until you tell me your favorite nontraditional swear word. And then while you're still naked I want to go online and find Barbie heels in your size. Okay?"

"Okay. But Castle?"

"Mmm?"

"I want to take all your clothes off you, too."

 **A/N** From a prompt by mobazan27: "In case no one's ever written anything for you."


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

It never occurs to her that Castle might reciprocate. Why would he?

And then he does.

Beckett is on her own for the weekend. Castle is participating in an early-fall mystery writers' conference in Cambridge, and Alexis has gone with him. When she was a little girl she used to sit by him at his book signings, coloring or playing with a toy, and when she got a bit older, reading. But she's never been to a conference and she's intrigued by the panel discussions and talks. It's a nice father-daughter thing, Beckett thinks. She's been looking forward to some quiet time, but now that she has it she feels oddly at loose ends, a little down in the dumps all alone in the loft. "Snap out of it," she instructs herself. It's Friday night, and she picks up her new, not-at-all-guilty pleasure—the latest in Sue Grafton's alphabet mystery series—and decides that some wine would be the perfect accompaniment. Grafton's kick-ass private eye, Kinsey Millhone, loves wine, and she's been one of Kate's role models since 1995, when the rebellious teenager read _L is for Lawless_ and then went back and started the series from the beginning, _A is for Alibi_. She'd needed plenty of alibis at that age.

When she reaches into the wine cabinet, her hand brushes against something. She draws the bottle out more carefully than usual and finds a plain white envelope, marked only with her initials, taped to it. She peels it off, opens it, and draws out a piece of yellow legal-pad paper that's folded in three. It's from Castle. He'd filled the front and most of the back, in black ink. She smiles when she realizes that he'd used a fountain pen: he brings that out only for really special occasions.

"Yesterday I was writing and wishing that I were at the precinct with you, or that you were here with me, having a glass of wine. I was half—no, probably quarter—listening to Pandora, and vaguely humming along when the expression "wine, women and song" sidled into my brain. Then I started wondering about its origins, so I looked it up and of course there's no real answer, though it may be the work of a German writer named Johann Heinrich Voss, who died in 1826. Why am I telling you this unfascinating piece of not-quite information? Because you're always interested in, if sometimes infuriated by, the weird paths my mind takes, just as I'm always interested in yours. You should know, though, that the favorite path my mind travels is right to you.

"But I digress, as I often do on a path when you're not around to get me back on it. 'Wine, Women and Song' was a big Loretta Lynn hit when I was a toddler. One of my numerous, not always sober sitters was a Country-Western fan who was given to yodeling (no kidding, she yodeled) that particular number a lot. I can still sing my favorite verse, 'When you're in the doghouse with the mangy old pup/You may start to thinking and a-giving up/Your wine, women and song.'

"The more I thought about the expression, the more I thought about you, but 'women' became 'woman.' The first time I heard you sing, really sing, was that night we all went to The Old Haunt. I'd just bought it. We were all drinking Scotch, not wine, but you got up and sang song after song. I knew then that you were absolutely the only woman for me. You were it. I'd known it before, but kept it at bay, but now I couldn't. Now I was sure that you were my forever, that nothing could keep me from wanting you. I was so in love with you that I almost told you right on the spot, but I held off because I was afraid that you'd think it was booze or sentiment talking. Do you know what you were wearing? It was the beginning of December, and it was already cold; you had on black pants, a black vest, a gray jacket, and a white-collar blouse buttoned all the way to the top. I waned to undo it with my teeth. After you warmed up you took off the jacket. Then you undid the vest but left it on, which was very sexy, and eventually you undid the top two buttons of your blouse, but it wasn't enough.

"I remember what you wore during every case we've worked, and I bet you've forgotten at least of half of them. Not the obvious moments, like when you were in next to nothing and talking in that Russian accent at the card game where I was in trouble, but other ones. The deep-cut brown jersey when I came back to apologize to you after that case, for instance. It was the same color as your eyebrows and I thought about that all the way home, and I was still thinking about it when I went to sleep. How I wanted to kiss your eyebrow. Of course now I get to remember all the times and ways I've seen you without any clothes, too.

"I'm leaving this letter here because when you want wine, and you always do at the end of the work week, you invariably take the bottle from the upper left-hand corner of the cabinet. You must wonder why I'm doing this, since (as you pointed out) I've written entire books for you. That's true, but it's also very different. Those are for everyone to read; this is just for you, and there's no Nikki in between. The four letters that you left for me are among the greatest treasures in my life. You made a good point about our not knowing lots of little things about each other. We still don't, but we're getting there.

"If you ask me to sing 'Wine, Women and Song,' I will. It won't sound like Loretta Lynn, but I can yodel."

She reads it three more times before folding it up and returning it to the envelope. If she leaves now, and she runs, she can get to Paper Source before it closes. She does, she does, and she does, and has just enough time to find a pretty box with grosgrain ribbon around the edges, and a ribbon of contrasting color that ties the lid down. She carries it home cradled against her chest, Castle's letter already snug inside. She never does have the wine, at least not this evening. When she's ready for bed she gets her phone and snaps a photo of the yellow letter nestled in the deep purple box, and sends it to Castle, along with a brief text: "Thank you xoxoxoxo"

At odd moments over the next several weeks, as sunrise comes later and later and evening arrives earlier and earlier, she thinks about the letter, and whether he'll write her another. Just as he didn't ask her, she won't nudge him. If that's the only one, it's more than fine. But this morning when he's staying home to write and she's heading out to work, he hands her a small paper bag.

"What's this, Castle?"

He grabs her wrist and reels her in against his side. "Your lunch."

"My lunch? Did you just lose all your money in a Ponzi scheme or something? Are we going to have to move back to my old apartment?"

"No, rich as ever, I'm happy to say. I made you lunch because you've been saying how tired you are of all the places to eat around the precinct."

"Wow, thanks. Can I look forward to this every day?"

"Sure, if you like. I bet I could find you a _Full House_ lunchbox on eBay."

"With a matching Thermos?"

"I don't think there's a _Full House_ Thermos big enough to keep you in coffee for an hour, Beckett."

"I'll just brown bag it." She kisses him, swipes her thumb across his mouth to remove the lipstick that she'd left behind, and goes out the door.

They're so busy with a case that it's two o'clock before she has a minute to eat lunch. She retrieves the brown bag from her drawer, fully expecting to find a PB&J sandwich, a package of Oreos, a bag of potato chips, and a smiley-face Post-It that says HAVE FUN TODAY! Instead there's roast beef and Dijon mustard on a seeded roll, and a Honey Crisp apple from the farmers' market. There's also an envelope, inscribed KHB, inside a plastic bag. She looks around the bullpen and decides to read in the relative privacy of the ladies' room. A few minutes later, she's locked in a stall and opens the envelope. Castle has written on yellow legal-pad paper again, but this time the letter fits on one side.

"When I was in second grade my teacher noticed that I often didn't want to trade sandwiches with anyone, which was the favorite lunchtime activity in our cafeteria. It always happened at the end of the week, and sometimes at the end of the month, and I always had the same thing, a macaroni sandwich. Nothing but noodles between two slices of white bread.

"One Friday when I opened my desk I found an orange inside, and a bag of peanuts. I looked all around the classroom, wondering who could have put them in there, and why, and then I saw my teacher. She smiled at me and nodded her head a tiny bit. And every Friday for the rest of the year, there was an apple, or orange, or banana and a bag of peanuts waiting in my desk. I wish I'd thanked her.

"I probably should have been enrolled in the free-lunch program, but my mother was far too proud for that. You'd think she'd want to ensure that I had something nutritious in the middle of the school day, but as I look back on this from the perspective of a parent, I understand that she knew I'd be embarrassed at lining up for free lunch. She worried about appearances for both of us. She always managed to give me a really good supper, with vegetables and protein, even if she was living on air. When she was working, things were fine; when she was living, or trying to live, on unemployment, it was tough. We never talked about it, but it must still haunt her.

"I never forget how lucky I was to have had enough money to support a child when Alexis was born. I was spared the anguish my mother had to endure. Having to eat macaroni sandwiches is probably what made me interested in cooking. The buried memory of sometimes being hungry as a kid may be why I take things from your plate.

"When I sold my first book, one of the things I did was to buy food that we usually couldn't afford when I was growing up—lobster, steak, French butter. I remember thinking that artichokes seemed really sophisticated, so I got some and bought special artichoke plates (I can hear you laughing, Beckett) with the cup in the middle for melted butter. I cooked them perfectly, and sat down to feast. I _hated_ them. Still hate them. An artichoke is the one thing I will never eat off your plate."

Because she's laughing about the artichokes, she's startled to see that three words—"trying to live"— in the middle of the paper are blurred. Momentarily confused, she looks up, as if she'd find a leak in the ceiling, and she discovers that she's crying. The image of Martha trying to protect her little boy, and of that little boy being ashamed but never saying anything to her, is overwhelming. She blots the teardrop with a Kleenex that she has in her pocket, and carries the letter back to her desk without folding it up. It needs to dry. She thinks about it throughout the afternoon, and when she gets home she hugs Castle as hard as she ever has, and hides her face in his shoulder for a long time. She wakes in the middle of the night, gets out of bed, and puts the letter in the ribboned box. For several minutes afterwards she stands next to the bed watching Castle sleep, then crawls back in, and takes his hand in hers until morning.

The next letter shows up inside her pocket: he must have slipped it in there when he was helping her on with her coat this morning. She finds it when she's at the butcher, waiting in line to pick up their Thanksgiving turkey. Actually, two turkeys, because Castle has learned that cooking two birds that weigh fourteen pounds each is much better than cooking one enormous one. Who is she to doubt him? She opens the envelope and reads.

"Don't you think it's weird that I'm writing you on cheap, lined yellow paper instead of nice stationery, as you did? Especially since you know that I'm a deluxe, acid-free, all-cotton paper kind of guy. It's because of this: when I started writing, I used legal pads. They were all I could afford and I liked the extra length because I could fit more words on a page. Plus I had a friend who was interning at a law firm and sometimes sneaked them out for me. Has the statue of limitations expired? I'd sit in a horrible booth in a bar or diner to write, and nurse a cup of coffee or a beer for as long as I decently could. I figured people might think I was a law student, which implied a seriousness and studiousness that I lacked.

"So, seriousness. You're one of the only people who knows, understands, and embraces my serious side. But here's something you don't know—and after you've read this, you'll be one of only three people in the world who do. The other is a pirate-record guy who sends me stuff from all over the world. Here it is: I have an undeclared passion for Bach. It doesn't compare to my passion for you, but it's a hell of a thing. I love the order of it. The imagination. The dedication. The resolution. The sonic architecture. Everything. I listen only with earphones because I can focus better and because no one knows what I'm doing. Have you ever heard _The Well-Tempered Clavier_? It's a set of two dozen preludes and fugues, one for each major and minor key. He meant it as an exercise for keyboard players. Exercise? What exercise could be that gorgeous? Other than you doing yoga. And then twenty years later, when he was in his mid fifties, he did a whole other collection. Twenty-four more. Moment after moment and layer after layer of simple-complex beauty.

"Come to think of it, that's a pretty good description of you. Moment after moment and layer after layer of simple-complex beauty."

Someone is poking her. And poking her again. What the hell? It's the woman behind her. "They've called your number like three times," she says sharply.

Beckett hadn't heard the butcher because she'd been standing in a daze, irritating all the other turkey buyers. "Sorry," she mumbles, suddenly captivated by the number of the ticket in her hand. She hangs on to it, rather than drop it in the basket, and takes the pair of well-wrapped turkeys from the man behind the counter. What are the odds, she thinks. Castle will love this.

When she gets home she puts the turkeys in the fridge and goes to find Castle. He's in his office, earphones on, and doesn't hear her come in. She taps him on the shoulder and he pulls off the earphones.

"Hi!" he says.

"Hey, Castle." She leans over, gives him a kiss, and puts the ticket on his desk, face down. "Take a look at that. It was my number at the butcher just now."

He picks it up, turns it over and smiles. "Twenty-four?"

"Yeah. Amazing, right? Definitely one of your universe-speaking moments."

He squeezes her hand. "I'm holding on to this."

"I figured you would. Now go back to Bach."

A week and a half later, she finds the fourth letter when she goes to make the bed. Castle is out shopping and must have put the envelope on her pillow just before he left. It's three short paragraphs, written on the same paper as the others.

"I fantasize a lot about you being pregnant. I don't mean sex, though my fantasies about sex with you are innumerable and exceeded only by the realities of sex with you. I mean your actually being pregnant. I do this most often when you're asleep, lying on your back and naked. Or maybe scantily clad. Anyway, definitely on your back. You're naturally so slim that your hip bones are noticeable, and I imagine them growing less and less so as your belly expands. They temporarily disappear. It's like time-lapse photography. I hope this doesn't creep you out, since we've never discussed having kid(s).

"You know this wouldn't be a proper fantasy of mine if I didn't—I admit it because otherwise you'd beat me up until I did—also look forward to something else getting bigger, not just your belly. Not that your breasts aren't perfect, because they are.

"Every time I think you couldn't be any more beautiful than you are, I say to myself, just wait until she's pregnant."

She puts her hand over her mouth, shakes her head, reads the letter until she has it memorized, and puts it in the purple, ribboned box.

On the Saturday morning before Christmas, while Beckett is taking a shower, Castle goes into his office. He's about to sit down when he sees a gray envelope on his chair. The letter inside is only one line long.

"Meet me in the living room at 8:00 p.m. sharp."

He's still standing, and squints as he looks towards the bathroom. What's she up to? Just for that, he's not going to ask. Not if it kills him, which he devoutly hopes it won't.

No day has ever dragged as this one has. He can hardly bear it. At 7:45 they're sitting in the living room reading. Beckett puts her book down, walks to the closet by the front door, and emerges with a large tote bag. "See you in fifteen minutes," she says and goes to the bedroom. He hears the door click shut.

At 7:59 he runs his fingers through his hair to make sure it's neat and runs his palm down the front of his shirt for the same reason. One minute later she comes into the living room. She's wearing a black silk dress cut very low, very high black silk heels, and a gold necklace. Her hair is soft around her face. She's smiling, but he notices two things: she looks very nervous and there's no way there's a bra under that dress.

She bows her head briefly before turning and walking to the piano. She lifts the lid of the bench, takes out some sheet music, sits down, flexes her fingers and takes a deep breath. When she begins to play, he recognizes it immediately: the first prelude of the first book of _The Well-Tempered Clavier_. It takes about three minutes, and it's not perfect, but it is. She's perfect. When she finishes she stays on the bench, quiet, for what seems forever but can't be more than a few seconds. She slides off, turns, and bows again. Her face is pink. So is his, but it's because he's crying.

"Was that okay?" she asks, her voice almost a whisper. "Could you even tell what it was?"

Before the invisible question mark can float into the ether he has his arms around her. "First prelude," he whispers. "I knew it from the first note. You're an incredible, incredible woman." He kisses her deeply and finally says, "Thank you."

"You're welcome." She slips her hand into his and gives it a tug. "C'mon, Castle."

"Where are we going?"

"Not far."

"Wow," he says as they enter the bedroom. "Just far enough."

There are flowers on his nightstand and hers, and votive candles flickering on almost every surface. She's moved a small table to her side of the bed; a tray with two glasses, already filled, and an open bottle of wine rest on top, along with a small plate that's covered with a linen napkin.

"I'm going to swap my concert attire for something comfier," she says before vanishing into the bathroom.

He needs no prompting, and quickly sheds everything but his boxers and tee shirt. He has just gotten on the bed and propped himself up against the headboard when she appears, wearing nothing at all. She walks right past him to the table, picks up one of the glasses and the little plate and hands them to him. After settling next to him, she reaches out to grab the remaining glass and raises it to his. "Salut," she says, taking a sip and looking at him over the rim.

He takes a sip, too, and sets his glass down on the bedside table. "That's definitely something comfier," he says, running his eyes over her again. "I didn't think you'd find something sexier than that dress you were wearing, but I was wrong."

She smiles, looking a little bashful. "Thanks." When she tucks her hair behind her ear he knows she's bashful, but he's not sure why.

"I can't believe you played the Bach for me. How did you even know that piece?"

"I didn't. But I took piano lessons for eight years so I called my old teacher and asked if he could help me. I was so rusty but he said it was like riding a bike and he was right. I asked if he thought I could get through the Bach and he said yes, and I've worked and worked on it since the day after Thanksgiving."

His eyes are wide. "But when did you practice?"

"Every time you went out. And I got a Casio keyboard that I kept in my locker at work and whenever I had a few minutes I went to the back staircase and played it on mute. I swear to God I played that prelude in my sleep. I'm surprised I didn't hum it while I was dreaming and wake you up." She tucks her hair behind her ear again. "I'm not exactly concert-ready, but I wanted to do it."

"You're ready enough for me, Kate. Best performance I've ever heard." He takes her hand and kisses it, and lifts the little plate off his lap. "This for me, too?"

"Yeah."

"Something to eat, I assume, what with the napkin."

"Yeah."

"Geez, Beckett, you're so chatty. Okay, let's see." He flips the cloth back and finds a sandwich, macaroni on white bread. "Ohhh." He needs to hold it together and not cry again.

"For old time's sake, Castle. May I have a bite?"

He clears his throat. "Sure. Be careful, you might love it so much that you'll want one every day. Instead of roast beef."

She leans over and takes a bite while he's still holding the sandwich. She chews, swallows, and takes a long drink from her glass. "No chance of that, Castle. I don't know how you did it." She stops and looks searchingly at him. "Actually, I do. You have the kindest heart. You must have had it even then."

He's unusually silent for a while. "This is quite an evening."

She grins wickedly. "Not over yet."

"I hope not."

"Castle?"

"Yeah?"

"I loved your letters. Love your letters. I didn't want to say it after each one, but I wanted to let you know how important they are to me. Will always be." She waits a moment, smoothing the small stretch of duvet that's between them. "So. How's the Châteauneuf-du-Pape? I know it's your favorite."

"Delicious, of course."

She slides down so that she's mostly on her back, but pressed against him. "What do you think?"

"About what?"

"My hip bones."

"Your hip bones?"

"Yeah. I asked how you liked the wine because I'm drinking grape juice. And I asked about my hip bones because I want you to start noticing if they're disappearing. Maybe you could take pictures. Every day. You know, time-lapse photography."

His glass is frozen halfway to his mouth. He returns it, unsteadily, to the nightstand. "Are you? You're?"

"Pregnant. Yes. I think we should save our letters for the baby."

TBC


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

 **A/N** And the story continues, after all!

Beckett feels like death on a Triscuit, sitting on the bathroom floor and trying not to wake Castle, really trying, because he'd been up late writing and should sleep for a while. Resting her head against the cool pedestal of the sink, she wonders how something this tiny, barely a blip on the pregnancy radar, could be responsible for such overwhelming nausea?

"Listen, you little monster," she whispers. "Stop making me feel so sick." She is suddenly overcome with remorse, so powerful that it momentarily suppresses her queasiness. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that you're really a monster. I meant that nicely. One of Daddy's favorite movies is _Monsters, Inc_. He'll probably watch it with you a hundred times. He loves nice monsters and so do I." And then she throws up.

"Oh, God," she says, after getting back on her feet and rinsing her mouth out. She tiptoes back to bed and looks at Castle, who's out cold. She'd never noticed it before, but he really does sleep like a _baby_. She drowses for another half hour, until the alarm goes off. She's surprised to find that she's in the bed alone—not actually alone, she corrects herself, looking at her belly which is still flat as the screen of her phone. She hears Castle coming, his bare feet slapping on the floor.

"Peppermint tea," he says cheerily as he walks into their bedroom, hoisting the mug as it were a trophy.

"Thank you, I think."

"You think? I ordered this specially, Beckett. It's organically grown on the dappled hillside of somewhere."

"Right." She sips it. "Not bad." She sips again. "Pretty good. Considering."

"Atta girl." He slips into bed next to her. "You feeling okay?"

She waggles her hand back and forth. "Meh."

"Won't be too much longer."

"Tell that to your child." She knew she shouldn't have said that. He leans sideways, peels up the hem of her shirt and moves his lips about half an inch above her navel.

"You hear that, BG? Your mom needs to feel better. Time for you to settle down in there." He sits back up and beams. "That should do it."

She can't help laughing. "Sure. So, you gonna call the baby BG for the entire pregnancy?"

"Unless you decide you want to know the gender after all, that's correct. BG for Boy or Girl."

"Then shouldn't you be saying Bog?"

"Absolutely not. Our kid is not a marsh."

"Or a swamp."

"Or a fen."

"Definitely not a fen, Castle. Sounds too much like Fenway Park. This baby can't have a name, even a prenatal nickname, that's associated with the Red Sox."

"Exactly. I'm sticking with BG."

She staggers through the day, and the next and the next, wishing that her morning sickness would come to an end. Sometimes it's afternoon sickness, which is worse because the boys don't know she's pregnant and stare cluelessly but curiously at her when she dashes off to the ladies room.

One evening she and Castle are lying at opposite ends of the sofa, reading on their iPads. He's allegedly engrossed in a novel, but she knows better. The book in question would not elicits those sotto voce "oohs," soft "wows," little smiles, and barely restrained fist pumps. She'd bet a significant amount of money that what he's really doing is looking at the latest in bassinets, cribs, changing tables, car seats, carriers, bouncy chairs, high chairs, play mats, baby monitors, and strollers. The man is in baby paraphernalia heaven.

She pokes his foot with hers. "Enjoying that book, Castle?"

"Huh?"

Such a giveaway. "Must be a good book."

"Right! It is. Totally engrossing."

That's the kind of fib she can live with, and she lets it be. She's checking his facial expression every few minutes and it gives her an idea. She gets up and starts walking to the bedroom.

"You okay, Beckett?"

"Fine. Just gonna do something. Keep on reading."

"Something" involves her gray stationery and a pen, which she collects and carries to a chair, where she sits down and begins to write.

"I finally have a name for you that I like: PB. I haven't told your father; he'd say that I chose it because peanut butter is my favorite food. He'd be partly right, too, because I do love my super-chunky peanut butter. What it really stands for is Pink and Blue, which somehow became the colors for babies: pink for girls, blue for boys. It's dopey: we should all wear whatever colors we want. For instance, your father's favorite shirt is pink. I love it when he wears blue, but only because it makes his blue eyes even bluer.

"Yesterday he was wearing a blue sweater and I told him that I hope you have blue eyes like his. And you know what he said? 'I don't care what color the baby's eyes are, as long as they're not pink. Pink eye, get it, Beckett?' Your father loves to make jokes like that. You'll find it out for yourself, but I'm just giving you fair warning. Pink eye, PB, is not fun and it's not the color of anyone's eyes. It's a nasty infection that makes the white of your eye and your eyelid turn pink for a while.

"Daddy and I don't care whether you're a girl or a boy, we'll be happy no matter what. The difference is that your father wants to know before you get born and I don't. When we were at the doctor last week he said, 'If it's a girl, I'll be tickled pink!' When I asked him what he'd be if you're a boy, he said, 'I'll be tickled pink with a boy, too. See? I can be a sartorial rebel just like you.' He says things like that a lot, too. When you're old enough to read this, you can ask him what he meant by sartorial rebel. He loves explaining things.

"Even though I think of you now as PB, I also call you ah. Ah is a wonderful word, a sound really, that you make when you're happy. In your case it's that, but it also stands for almost here. You aren't really almost here, you're months and months away, but still. You're here with me all the time, which is kind of weird. Weird in the best way. Until I met your father I was by myself a lot and I liked it, or thought I liked it. I do still need some time by myself, and he knows that and leaves me alone when I do. Most of the time I'd rather be with him, though, not by myself. Ah!

"Now I have you with me wherever I go. When I first found out about you I figured that after the first few days I'd be used to the idea and wouldn't think about you every minute, at least until you started kicking me. But guess what? I do think about you all the time. Not every minute, but almost. I know you aren't talking, but I think I hear you saying you'd like us to go to sleep now. I'm listening to you! I'm going to brush my teeth and get into bed.

"I wonder if you can feel it when I brush my teeth? That's the kind of thing your father would wonder about, and now I am. That's what happens when you love someone: you start reading each other's minds."

Except she doesn't make it as far as the bathroom. She falls asleep with the letter on her lap, and doesn't wake when the pen rolls onto the floor.

Castle is mentally composing a letter to BabyBjörn about the inadequate color choices of their updated bouncy chair when he realizes that Beckett has been gone for quite a while. Not only that, she's not made a peep, which is a little worrying. He pushes himself off the sofa and heads for the bedroom, since that's the direction she was going—he checks his watch—two hours ago? The instant he puts his foot info his office he sees her, half curled up in an armchair, with something on her lap. She must have drifted off reading a magazine; he'll pick her up and put her to bed.

It's not a magazine, though, it's the stationery. That stationery. She must be writing him another letter! He'd assumed that was in the past, but here's evidence to the contrary. Should he read it now or wait until she leaves it wherever she's thinking of leaving it? He puts his weight on his left foot, and then shifts it to his right. There's nothing wrong with taking a peek, surely? The letter is for him. There's no federal statute involved, anyway, since it's not in the mail.

He'll just look at the first paragraph, how bad a sin is that? No sin at all. Not even a transgression. A minor infraction, at most. Besides, she's written on two pieces of paper: this is a long letter and must have lots of paragraphs, so in the grand scheme of things? First paragraph it is. She'll never know.

Worried that she'd feel him exhaling, he takes a deep breath and holds it while he starts to read. PB? Oh, my God, that's adorable. He's grateful for the speed-reading course he took years ago, because he gets right through the sartorial rebel section before he has to breathe again. Okay, so it was three paragraphs, not one, but he's stopped now. It's killing him, but he's not going to read the rest. He tiptoes back out to the living room.

"Beckett!" He says it again, louder. "Beckett?"

She rolls her head upright against the back of the chair. She must have nodded off for a minute.

"Beckett?"

He's coming! She grabs the stationery, folds the papers in half and shuts them inside the nearest book, which is on a small table at her elbow. "Hey, Castle. Sorry, I guess I was napping."

"Whatcha reading?"

Oh, hell, Mister Inquisitive. She doesn't even know what's in her hand. "Um. Oh, it's your Ferrari manual. Very interesting. I thought maybe it should go back in your car though. In case you, uh, you know, need it. On the road."

"Okay, thanks." If she only knew how desperate she looks. He'll play along. "Here, I'll take it."

She clutches it so hard she bends it. "No, I want to read something in here. About cylindrical cleaning." Cylindrical cleaning? What is she thinking? "Remember that time, you know, when we got locked in the trunk of that GTO? In the Pandora case? And you were amazed that I knew about muscle cars."

"Of course I do." Of course I do, we were thrust together in a dark, enclosed space, with you all but sprawled on top of me and I wanted—. "Cylindrical cleaning, huh?"

"And other things. I mean, Castle, who knows? The baby and I could be in the Ferrari without you and if it broke down I'd want to know what to do. It would set a bad example if the baby thought I was some pathetic, helpless female who knew zilch about cars."

He has to hand it to her. If he were on the other side of the interrogation table from her, he'd believe every word of this. "Good point. Want some tea before bed?" Give her a little time to take that letter out of the manual, where she clearly stashed it, and let her hide it wherever she wants.

"Oh, yes. Yes, please. Thanks, Castle."

He retreats to the kitchen, taking more time than necessary to brew a mug of tea, and making more noise than usual on the trip back to the bedroom. She's sitting up, leaning against the headboard, when he comes in.

"I washed my face and brushed my teeth and I'm all ready for bed," she says happily. "Is that my tea?"

"It is." He hands her the mug and sits down beside her. They chat dreamily about nothing for a few minutes, and when she finishes her tea he reaches for the empty mug. "You gonna sleep now?"

"Yeah. Turns out growing a baby makes me ridiculously tired."

"Mind if I go next door? I want to write for a while I'm feeling inspired."

She kisses him lightly, topples over, and attempts a wave. "Night, Castle. Love y—." She's out.

Back in his office, he opens the top drawer of his desk and removes a legal pad and a pen. He looks towards the bedroom door, then at the lined yellow paper, and begins.

"Right now you're the size and shape of a little lima bean, which is funny (or maybe not so funny) because your mother is the color of a lima bean every morning. Pale green.

"I like knowing this about you because by the time I get to hold you you won't be lima beanish at all; you'll be a miniature mix of your mother and me. Hey, I'm sorry about the alliteration, but I'm feeling a little sappy right now. Someday I'll explain why too much alliteration is a bad thing, but not now.

"People don't give lima beans—I'm talking about you, BG, even though you'll outgrow the lima-bean stage by next week—the respect they deserve. They're originally from Guatemala. I wonder if they speak Spanish? Maybe something else, because lima beans have been around for thousands of years, way before any Spaniards landed in the Americas. Anyway, my point is that people turn their noses up at lima beans, which they shouldn't because they're amazingly healthy, full of vitamins and minerals and fiber. I won't bore you with a science lesson; just take my word for it. And remember that if anyone offers you lima beans say yes. They're part of your heritage! You were once a lima bean yourself. And don't worry, eating one isn't cannibalism.

"I think your mother got a lima bean stuck up her nose when she was about four and had to go to the emergency room to have it removed. Please don't do that, okay? I'm a big fan of family traditions, but that wouldn't be a good one.

"Next time I write you'll probably be the size of a fig. Big as a fig! I can't wait to give you a Fig Newton. Those are seriously great cookies."

He folds the sheet of paper in three, puts it inside a white envelope, shuts it in his desk drawer and smiles.

TBC


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

Castle is home today, ostensibly to write about Nikki and Rook, but what he really wants to do is think about PB-BG Beckett Castle. That's much more important. He can write about Nikki another time.

It's been a week since he read Beckett's letter to the baby—part of it, not all of it—and he wonders where she squirreled it away after fishing it back out of the Ferrari manual. Maybe in the purple box with the letters that he'd left for her? Even he has trouble coming up with a credible excuse for snooping in there. What's the most likely hiding place, other than the definitely-off-limits purple box, for her to have stashed the new letter? He ruminates on that for a while, chewing on a peanut butter cup that had found its way into his desk drawer. A drawer, that's it! The letter's probably in one of her drawers. She opens his all the time, the drawer with tee shirts, because she loves to sleep in them. He doesn't do the same to her, though, so what could justify his doing it now? He helps himself to another peanut butter cup, which he's almost certain has been scientifically proven to be an effective brain stimulant.

He's tossing the wrapper in his wastebasket when inspiration strikes. The laundry! No need to leave it to the housekeeper, who will be here tomorrow. If he does the laundry now it will free her up for other, more important things; it would be helpful. Why, look, he smeared some peanut butter and chocolate on his shirt, and it should be attended to before the stain sets in. He unbuttons it and walks to the bathroom to pick up the hamper.

In the time it takes to do two loads of wash, he manages to write one paragraph of his new Nikki Heat book. It could have been more, but he had to keep checking on the laundry's progress. Why does it take so long for this stuff to dry, anyway? They really should buy towels that aren't so thick. It's not until his seventh trip that everything is done, and he begins to sort it all on a table: three pairs of socks, a hoodie, a bath mat, and oh, dear God, Beckett's underwear. Teeny, tiny, sexy. He sees her in them every day, but folding them up right out of the dryer is a something of a mind-altering experience. It makes him think that if he'd known she wore things like this before they'd gotten together, he wouldn't have survived a day at the precinct.

He carries a tidy pile of things back to their room and drops it on the bed. With the noblest of intents, he opens her underwear drawer. Behold, a gray envelope! It's not addressed to anyone, not even PB or ah. He stares at it for a bit and then, while putting away the clean underwear, chances to flip over the envelope. It's not sealed. Should he or shouldn't he? Obviously he shouldn't. He'll take the moral high ground and leave it there, unread but not unnoticed. Should probably flip it back over, though, in case Beckett remembers how she left it.

For the rest of the day, that letter plays hide and seek in his head. He's going mad, and needs distraction. At 3:30 he texts her.

"How are you feeling? You and BG hungry for dinner and if so, for what?"

Her reply arrives ten minutes later. "Lamb chops and pistachio macarons."

Who is he to question a pregnant woman's culinary choices? "Okay. Would you like something green?"

That provokes an immediate response: "Pistachio macarons are green."

"Good point."

So are spinach, asparagus, broccoli, zucchini, peas, kale, celery, cucumbers, Brussels sprouts, lettuce—not to mention the glorious lima bean and the dreaded artichoke—and a lot of other things he can think of, but that's not what she requested. Still, she might want a green vegetable after all, so when he runs out for the chops and the macarons, he also buys asparagus. And some suitable fruit.

After she gets home she wants to change into yoga pants, and briefly disappears while he begins to get dinner ready. He doesn't hear her return, but senses a displacement of air, and he looks up.

"Did you do the laundry?" She sounds a little confrontational.

How the hell did she know? "Yeah." Snap, snap, snap, he's breaking off the tough ends of the asparagus stalks.

"Alicia always does it." Quite confrontational.

He already doesn't like where this conversation is going. A conversation that could become a grilling, and not a grilling such as he's about to give the lamb chops. He's beginning to feel even more defenseless than those chops.

"Right." He drizzles olive oil over the asparagus, sprinkles some salt on it, and puts it in the broiler.

"Except for that time when we, you know, the duvet, I've never seen you do laundry."

"I'm very good at it. Carefully sort colors, know the proper water temperatures and spin cycles, everything." Shit, he's run out of things to do in the kitchen.

"Castle."

"Yes?" He produces his very best, sweetest, and most innocent smile.

"You left my underwear drawer open."

Not possible. Totally impossible, he couldn't have. He'd been so careful. Oh, except that last time he'd gone in and opened the drawer and was once again stoic in the face of temptation, the house phone had rung and—. He can see it. Feel it burning into his brain: he hadn't shut the drawer and there was still half a pile of laundry on the bed.

"I didn't read it. I swear. Really."

"Really."

"Seriously, you could dust it for prints. I didn't."

"You do remember that I'm a detective, right?"

"Oh, the best. The best detective, yes."

"So when I see laundry on our bed but I know Alicia hasn't been here, and I see a drawer open, the drawer where I put a letter for safekeeping a few days ago, my—"

"A week."

"What?"

"A week. You must have put it there a week ago."

Her eyes are narrowing sharply. "As I was saying, Castle. When I see this particular combination of things, my prefrontal cortex starts to—"

His eyes get wider. "God, that's so hot. Prefrontal cortex. Anyone else would've just said 'brain'." She's close enough to grab now, and he does. Hauls her in and gives her a kiss that could have scorched the asparagus, which was just beginning to sizzle a few steps to his right. "So hot," he murmurs against her neck.

She smacks him quarter-heartedly on the bicep. "You know it's a letter to the baby, don't you?"

"Um. I might, yeah."

"I know you know it is because you already read it, didn't you?" This time she pokes him in the center of the sternum with her index finger. "You saw it when I fell asleep in the chair, right after I'd written it. I bet you've been trying to find it ever since, haven't you? And then you made an educated guess and voilà!"

"Voilà!" he says, feebly.

"Learning French, are you?"

"Listen, I can explain. Just hang on a sec or this wonderful dinner I've made for you will go up in flames. Okay?"

"Okay. But I'm going to sit right here and watch you."

"I love it when you watch me, Beckett. Or better yet, watch us."

"Stop trying to change the subject, Castle."

He puts a napkin, fork, knife, and glass of water on the counter in front of her. "Here you go," he says with a flourish, handing her a plate with three perfectly cooked lamb chops and a stack of asparagus.

"Where are my macarons?"

He's taken aback. "You want them now? With your main course?"

"Of course with my main course."

Oh. Okay, then. He fetches the plate of pistachio treats and gives it to her. "Sorry."

"Thank you." She picks up a macaroon, breaks it into bits and sprinkles it over her lamb. He stifles a gagging sound and refrains from comment as she takes another and crumbles it over the asparagus. "Mmm, this is delicious," she says after a few bites. "How did you know that the asparagus would go so well with the macaron?"

"Lucky guess," he says, looking at her plate with horror. He's glad that he got fruit, too, since at this rate she'll have eaten all the cookies before it's time for dessert. As Beckett attacks her bizarre dinner, he starts thinking how he'll respond to her pursuit-of-the letter question.

"So, you were going to explain?"

Geez, didn't get a chance to rehearse anything. "Right." Accepting the proposition that truth is the best defense, he owns up. "Last week I found you asleep in the chair. I thought you were reading a magazine and you looked so exhausted I was going to carry you to bed. But when I went to pick you up I saw that what was on your lap was actually a letter. I'm serious, I really did think you were writing to me again. It was the same stationery and everything. And then I read the first couple of sentences." He looks pleadingly at her. "Can't fault me for that, can you?"

No reaction of any kind.

"Okay, so obviously I realized straight off that you were writing to the baby, not me. It was so cute. PB, Beckett! I promised myself that I'd read only one paragraph, but then I couldn't stop. I did, though. Stop, I mean. After the third paragraph. And just for the record, I can't wait to give a sartorial rebellion exegesis to our child."

She snorts a laugh. "I think I'm already feeling sorry for the poor kid."

"But that's as far as I allowed myself to go. Three measly paragraphs and that letter is two pages long. I read a mere fraction of that letter. Don't I get to read the rest?"

"After the way you sneaked around?"

"What about if I offer you some dessert that's appropriate for the occasion?"

"What occasion? This is an occasion? Other than a tasty dinner, I will say."

"Just wait."

He opens the fridge, removes a large bowl and takes it to Beckett.

"Grapes?"

"They're green, to go with the macarons and the asparagus, but fortunately not the lamb."

"I sense an 'and' coming."

"Your senses are in good working order, then. Right now PB-BG is the size of a grape, so I got these in the baby's honor."

She pulls a grape off the stem and pops it into her mouth. "You could have asked me, you know. Avoided all the subterfuge."

"Really?" He's stunned. "You'd have let me read it?

"Didn't say that, Castle. Just said you could have asked me." She chews another grape while staring at him.

Two can play at this, he figures, staring right back until he starts to laugh. He can never hold out against her. "Well, if it hadn't been for the subterfuge, as you call it, I'd never have had the pleasure—and believe me, it was a pleasure—of folding your underwear, still warm from the dryer." He can tell that she's beginning to crack: a tiny crease at the corner of one eye, a suggestion of an upturned tip. "And don't call me a perv."

That pushes the door wide open, and she begins to laugh, too. When she recovers, she stands up. "Okay, perv, I'll go get the letter." She's halfway through the living room before she turns her head and says. "I'll let you read it if I get to read yours."

Sometimes he worries about being married to a detective.

A few minutes pass and she hasn't returned, so he loads the dishwasher.

"Castle?" she calls from the office door. "You coming?"

To hell with the dishes. He takes off.

She's not in the office, though, she's in bed, holding that envelope in the palm of her had. "Where's yours?"

"Hmm?"

"Your letter to the baby. I know you wrote one."

"You been sniffing around, Beckett?"

"Don't need to. Once I knew you knew about mine, I knew you'd done one, too. And I don't have to go through your underwear drawer to know that it's not there."

"Okay, smarty pants, where is it?"

"That's sexy pants to you, and I'd guess it's in the middle drawer of your desk because you put everything in there."

He turns, not to the office as she'd expected, but to his own underwear drawer. He extracts something, turns back to Beckett, and waves it: a white handkerchief. "I surrender."

"Good," she says, with a smile. "Go get that letter."

When he's sitting up next to her in bed, holding his own letter, he asks, "How do you want to do this? Just swap, or read aloud?"

They pick the latter, with her reading her letter, and him reading his. Twice. When they finish, they put them back in their respective envelopes and drop them in the drawer of her nightstand. Cuddling ensues—cuddling that escalates fairly quickly. He's peeling her (his, she took it!) tee shirt off her when he pauses. "You know one of the things I love about you being pregnant, Kate?"

"What?" She's already breathing hard, and running her hands under his shirt.

"We don't have to worry about your getting pregnant, because you already are."

"Good thing I'm not a rabbit, then."

"Oh, God, don't give me ideas."

She nibbles his ear. "That's why I said it."

TBC


	5. Chapter 5

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

He's looking for his lucky socks. Whenever he hits a wall when he's writing—which seldom happens, thank God—he puts them on. There's nothing unusual about them: they're navy blue, a silk-cashmere blend. Except they're lucky. The first time he'd worn them was on a cool September evening a year after he and Beckett had started working together. They'd closed a drug-smuggling case and he'd told her that she was afraid of looking into her mother's murder again, even though he had new information and leads, and she'd kicked him out. He'd staggered home, taken off his jacket and shoes, had a drink or two, and tried to write. Feeling worse than sorry for himself, he'd spilled some Scotch on the floor and stepped in it, so he'd had to change his socks. And then he'd downed a lot of coffee, had a heart-to-heart with Alexis, and gone back to the precinct in his new socks. He'd found Beckett working alone in the bullpen and apologized for violating her trust. To his astonishment, she'd taken him back.

Q.E.D.: lucky socks.

They're his personal four-leaf clover, his very own rabbit's foot, and he can't find them. "Rabbits eat clover, but they don't wear socks," he says, pawing through his sock drawer one more futile time. Where the hell could they be? He'd ask Beckett, but she doesn't know that he's in the crushing grip of writer's block. He hasn't told her because she always worries about it, and he doesn't want her fretting while she's pregnant. Still, he's almost frantic. Since yesterday morning he's been stuck on chapter eleven, paragraph six, sentence two of his new book. He can't see his way out, and without those socks he can't see himself progressing to sentence three.

And then he remembers. Beckett has cold feet, literally cold feet, which has always tickled him because she's one of the bravest people he has ever known. A few nights ago she'd gotten out of bed to get some socks, and he'd watched her open one of his drawers, not hers.

"You stealing my socks, Beckett?"

"I don't steal, Castle, I borrow."

"What's the matter with your own socks?"

"Yours are nicer. And softer. And much bigger, so I have a lot of room to wiggle my toes."

"Are your feet growing along with your br—"

"Shut up, Castle."

"Right."

In the dim light he hadn't really noticed, but concentrating now makes him realize that she had taken a pair of dark blue socks. They were those socks, the most important item in his wardrobe. Well, along with his lucky belt (the one he'd had on when he sold his first book; it was too small for him now, but what the hell) and his lucky shirt (the one he'd been wearing when Beckett had showed up at the door, soaked to the skin, and said she wanted him. She'd peeled if off him in the bedroom, the very one he's standing in now).

He'd looked in the hamper and the washing machine, to no avail. Maybe she accidentally kicked them under the bed? He gets down on the floor to check; no dice. Not even any dust bunnies. Thank you, Alicia, you are one fantastic housekeeper. What about the closet? He hasn't really looked because why would the socks be there? He checks his watch and sighs: writer's block has now been paralyzing him for thirty hours. Okay, the closet: he takes a deep breath and opens the double doors, trying to decide where to begin his 900-cubic-foot search.

Fifteen minutes and one aching knee later, he spies them. They're tucked inside his white sneakers, which he hasn't looked at in months because they're lightweight canvas and it's the middle of winter. He always wears them at Eastertime, and only at Eastertime. Alexis had picked them out for him when she was six, pleading with him to buy them because their interior was pink and the color combination made her think of the Easter Bunny. Unlike the belt, the sneakers still fit. But why would Beckett hide his socks—because she definitely sequestered them—and why here? He plucks them from the shoes and can feel that there's something lumpy inside. He reaches into one sock; whatever's in there is small and incredibly soft, and he easily pulls it out.

"Awwww!" He finds its mate inside the other sock and holds them up. "Awwww!" They're slate gray, knitted booties, each with floppy ears, black eyes, and a pink nose. Taped to the sole of one of them is a miniature envelope the size of a driver's license, in the familiar gray paper of her letters. The envelope is unmarked, and he opens it. There's only one sentence on the card, written in her distinctive hand:

"Did you ever think that since we behave like rabbits, we might have a baby bunny?"

And then he sees a tiny arrow which indicates that he should turn over the card. She's written one very short sentence on the other side.

"I love you, my lagomorph."

He's so sure that his heart will explode through his chest that he presses his hand over it to hold it in. When he's caught his breath, he returns the card to its envelope, folds his hand around it and sits down hard on the floor of the closet. She has never called him by a pet name before. Not once, not in any situation or context. He freely admits that he's a sentimental man, but this? It makes him cry like a baby, a very happy baby, and he's grateful that no one is there to see him in this state.

This is one letter he can't imagine ever letting their child see, even at the age of 21.

He pulls on his newly unearthed talismanic socks and goes to his desk. Yes! Sentence three comes to him in a flash, and so does the next. Whole pages tumble out of him, and at some point he looks at his feet. "Thanks, socks." Quite a lot of time must have elapsed because he's suddenly aware of his stomach grumbling. He goes to the kitchen, reaches for some cheese in the fridge and quickly withdraws his hand. "Just so you know, I'll never eat Welsh rarebit again," he tells the refrigerator. "It may be spelled r-a-r-e-b-i-t, but it's pronounced rabbit." He has a peanut butter sandwich instead, which he eats while standing in front of the sink, thinking about the baby booties and the note.

Back at his computer, he checks his progress: he had finished chapter eleven and had written all of chapter twelve. That leaves him at the unopened door of number thirteen, which is certainly some kind of indication that he should knock off writing for the day. It's a good-luck moment, without question, and it calls for a legal pad and a pen. He writes.

"Except for 'Ricky'—which, incidentally, I loathe—I've never had a nickname. Not one, did you know that? Technically, Rick is a nickname for Richard, but I don't count it, just as I don't count Kate a nickname for Katherine.

"How did I get through umpteen schools without picking up one? Maybe kids called me something awful or something funny behind my back, maybe people do that now, but it's not the same. To me a nickname connotes both affection and acknowledgment, and maybe I didn't get one because I never stayed in a place long enough. I remember thinking, when I was about ten, that it would be cool if someone called me Raj, for Rodgers, but so exotic. No one did, and I didn't have the nerve to give myself that name. This was decades before _The Big Bang Theory_ , but it might explain why Raj is my favorite character on the show.

"That's something I've never told anyone, not a soul. So when I found your card today inside the baby booties and you called me your lagomorph, I suddenly belonged. I had a nickname. A whole world opened that had been closed to me before. It's not like Raj, but it's better. It's just between you and me. So, yes, I guess that makes it a pet name (maybe we should get a pet rabbit, what do you think?) rather than a nickname, but it more than serves the purpose. It makes my heart sing.

"I know that you hate nicknames. If I accidentally call you even some widely-accepted term of endearment like 'sweetheart' or 'honey,' your glare removes the outer layer of my skin. But for the rest of my life I'll be able to hear you whispering 'lagomorph' in my ear, or feel it against my cheek. Just don't let it morph into 'lago,' because that sounds like the name for a laggard.

"Is it okay with you if I have a bunch of nicknames for the baby? Because I have to tell you that I'm already calling those booties—which by the way are the cutest thing in the history of infant footwear—Flopsy and Mopsy."

He folds the paper in three, slips it into a plain envelope, and slides it under his laptop. Five o'clock. Beckett will be home any minute, and he should start thinking about dinner. Then he has a better thought: they'll go out. Somewhere within a few blocks, so they can walk there even in the bitter cold.

They have a wonderful Italian dinner around the corner. He briefly considers eating something off her plate just to prove that he can do that in a public place, but scotches the idea. She asks him how his writing is going and he answers, honestly and enthusiastically, "Great! Almost two chapters today."

By nine she's curled up in bed. "You know," he says from the doorway, "we ate dinner so early that we didn't have any dessert. Would you like something?"

"Sure." She's sending that sleepy smile that liquefies him, and on slightly gelatinous legs he walks to the kitchen to fetch what he'd bought specially for her earlier in the day. He unties the box, lifts out the treat, and puts it on a plate. On the way to the bedroom he retrieves the envelope from under his laptop and puts it in his back pocket.

"Here you go," he says, crawling onto the bed.

"Ooooh, carrot cake! Yum."

"Yeah, saw it when I was out earlier and thought you might like it."

"You thinking of splitting this with me, Castle? I see two forks but only one plate."

"I am." I am because I am your lagomorph and lagomorphs love carrots, he wants to say, but instead asks, "Okay?"

"Okay." Another liquefying smile.

When they're finished she announces that she's going to brush her teeth, just as he knew she would. While she's in the bathroom he transfers the envelope from his pocket to her pillow and takes the plate and forks to the kitchen. By the time he gets back to their room she's in bed, holding up the envelope.

"What's this, Castle?"

"You ever hear of the Pony Express?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Well, that was just delivered by the Lagomorph Express."

TBC

A/N Thank you all for your enthusiasm for this story. I hope it's something of a balm for the horrible wound we received earlier this week.


	6. Chapter 6

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

Kate Beckett is visibly pregnant now. No shirt is voluminous enough or sufficiently tent-like to conceal her belly, and since spring is in full bloom she can no longer hide her impending maternal state under a jacket or coat. She has never liked it when women flaunt pregnancy, but now that she has a significant baby bump she's surprised to catch herself rubbing her hand over it. And when she's alone, she's a complete sap, talking to the baby.

It's midweek: she unexpectedly has the day off and time on her hands because Castle is at the dentist. She decides to make herself a cup of I'm-tolerating-it tea and carries it to the second floor. "I think I'm going to be waddling pretty soon," she mutters as she climbs the open staircase. On Valentine's Day Castle had surprised her with an office of her own, complete with a roll-top desk, chair, a love seat, and a wall of bookcases; he'd transformed a small room that had been a catch-all for suitcases, off-season clothes, misbegotten impulse buys, and things that he couldn't bear to throw out.

"You can't possibly want this chia pet, Castle," she told him several months ago when they'd been putting the Christmas decorations away and she'd tripped over yet another box labeled IMPORTANT—SAVE THIS.

"I might. I could."

"You do know he can't grow any more hair, right?"

"Beckett, it's Scooby-Doo. He's a detective. I can't possibly get rid of him."

"And these?" she asked, holding up a pair of fluorescent orange rollerblades.

"Definitely could use them sometime."

She digs deeper into the box and holds up an ancient microwave. "Got an explanation for this?"

"Had it freshman year in college. Sentimental value."

"I suppose you have some bags of popcorn that go with it."

When he doesn't reply she rootles around and comes up with one. "Chili-dog flavor? Really? Did you get a lot of girls with that?"

"You'd be amazed."

"You wouldn't have gotten me."

"Course not. You were underage."

She's about to throw the bag at him when something catches her eye. "Huh. 'Best if eaten before August third, nineteen ninety-two.' Castle! It's not even from this century."

"Then it's on its way to being an antique. You don't know, I might found some kind of museum."

"The Land That Time Forgot Museum?"

"Something like that."

Now all of it—from the little pink bicycle ("If we have a girl, Kate, she can have this." "Do you not remember my lifelong contempt for that girly icon? No daughter of mine is riding a Barbie bike, Rick.") to the cast-iron Christmas tree stand—is in a walk-in storage locker in the basement of the building, and Beckett has her own private space. She gets the box of her favorite gray stationery from a desk drawer and settles down on the love seat, the tea cooling on an occasional table next to her.

"The year before you were born I wrote some notes—letters, I guess you'd call them—to Daddy in case no one had ever written anything for him. I wasn't sure, and it turned out that no one had. But I _know_ that no one has ever written anything for you, and that's one reason I'm doing this. I heard on the news that today, April 27, is National Tell a Story Day, so I decided to tell you one. I'm not a born storyteller like Daddy is, and he'll probably make up an amazing one for you every day, not just on April 27. But even Daddy can't tell you everything, and that's where I come in. And today I'm telling you a true story, even though it begins the way a fairy tale does.

"Once upon a time there was a woman who worked very, very hard at her job. She was a detective and she loved it, but when she wasn't working she was sad and she was mad. Everybody is sad or mad some of the time, but for her it was almost all the time. She slept under sad sheets and a mad blanket. She ate sad for breakfast and mad for lunch, and dinner—although sometimes she was so sad and mad she forgot to eat. She drank a lot of sad coffee with mad cream. She was sad when the sun came up in the morning and mad when the sun set at night. When she went for long runs all by herself she wore sad socks and mad shoes.

"She was alone a lot. She said she liked it, but she didn't. She had been mad and sad for such a long time that she didn't know how not to be that way.

"One evening while she was working on a case she had to arrest a man. He wasn't a bad man and she let him go, but then he wouldn't go away. He was a writer and started following her around at work all the time. He wanted to write a book about her and the people she worked with, and he drove her crazy. He was like a pebble that gets in your shoe. It keeps moving around and you never know if it's going to get caught between your toes or jab your heel or press into your arch. And because she had to keep running so hard she couldn't stop to get that pebble out of her shoe. Even when she did, somehow it got right back in there. This writer was the peskiest pebble ever.

"He was nosy, too. He kept poking into things he shouldn't have poked into. If she put up a NO TRESPASSING sign, he would just jump right over it! Or he might see it but say, 'Oh, I didn't think that meant _me_. I thought that was for someone else.'

"But then one day the detective discovered that she wasn't as mad and as sad as she used to be. It hadn't happened boom! like that, it had happened sloooooowwwwly over a long time, more than a year. At first she thought well, he's useful at work, he does help me solve cases. But he did other things, too, like bring her delicious coffee every day, just the way she liked it, and give a fancy coffee machine to the police precinct where she worked so that everyone could have good coffee, all the time. He was very generous in lots and lots of ways, not just with money but with his heart.

"The detective finally understood that he was a kind, kind man. He still felt like a pebble in her shoe sometimes, but she also thought and thought and knew what the most important thing was. She wasn't sad and mad much anymore. He made work more fun, but he made the rest of her life, the not-working part, fun, too. Fun and interesting.

"He still made her mad once in a while, though, and one terrible day they had an argument. She told him he was the funniest kid in school. That might seem like a nice thing to say, but it wasn't. She meant it to be mean, and it hurt his feelings.

"Right after that the detective got hurt and had to go the hospital. She couldn't work for a long time and she went right back to the way she had been before she had met the writer, mad and sad.

"Grown-ups make a lot of mistakes, PB—by the time you read this you'll have a different name, not PB, but that's who you are to me right now—but if they work hard, they can fix them. And the detective worked hard to be open-hearted like the writer and the writer worked hard to understand that sometimes the NO TRESPASSING sign meant him, too.

"By now you've probably figured out that the writer in this story is Daddy and that the detective is me. We fell in love. Love is the greatest thing in the world, but you have to take good care of it, and we are.

"That's why we made you."

She has filled up two pieces of paper, and puts them inside the envelope. She's surprised that she's been here for almost an hour, and that Castle hasn't come back. But she's still in a writing mood, so she takes out some more stationery and begins a second letter, this one for Castle.

"I often wonder what the baby will look like, what kind of combination of the two of us and other people in the gene pool.

"You love to take pictures, as I'm painfully aware. Have you ever noticed that you've never seen any of me in my teens? Except for the ones taken right before my mother died. There's a reason. Maybe you think I was hiding from a bad complexion, as a lot of adolescent girls do, but no. I was very lucky in the skin department. No one but my father and my aunt know what I'm about to tell you. People I grew up with could probably figure it out if they saw me now, or maybe not. Maybe they'd just think we all look different as adults than we did as teenagers.

"My differences, though, are not entirely natural. I hate telling you this because I hate what it says about me, or what it says about who I used to be. But I need to tell you.

"The nose that you love to run your finger down after we make love—do you know that you almost always do that? it's so sexy and so endearing—is not the nose I was born with. When I turned 13 the bump in my nose grew more pronounced; I'd lock myself in the bathroom and stare at it and sob. I didn't look like an aardvark and my nose wasn't so big that you could shelter from the rain by standing under it, but it felt that way. Some of the boys used to honk at me when I walked by them in the hall at school, and it was devastating.

"Looking back on it now—looking down the bridge of my perfect nose, thank you, Dr. March—I think my nose was kind of noble. The trouble is, noble is worth nothing when you're a teenager. My mother used to tell me I'd grow into it, which only made me feel worse.

"As soon as I got to Stanford I got a job waitressing in a diner about ten miles from campus. I didn't want anyone to know what I was doing and I took every crappy shift there was, anything to make money. Kept every dime and often hitchhiked to work, God help me, just to save the bus fare. I researched plastic surgeons in the area, went for three consultations, and was crushed that my waitress money wasn't enough to cover even relatively simple rhinoplasty. (A word I hate, for obvious reasons. As if I didn't already think of myself as a rhino with a horn for a nose.)

"I was desperate to get it done, and I finally worked out a way to get the rest of the money. My parents had given me a beautiful watch for high school graduation, which leads to part two of my horrible admission: I sold it. I told them I'd lost it and have never forgiven myself for the lie. But what I got for it, combined with my waitressing money, covered the cost of the surgery. I had it done the first day of spring break, in Oakland. I told my parents another lie, that I was going hiking in the Sierras with some friends, so they wouldn't expect me to come home or to be checking in regularly during the two-week holiday. I chose to do it at the very beginning so that my black eyes would fade by the time classes began again, and hid out in a total dive of a motel for the first week before going back to the dorm.

"It mortifies and angers me that I was so lacking in self-confidence that I permanently altered my appearance and that I accepted a cultural ideal of what constitutes beauty. When I came home for the summer my parents didn't say anything about it. Not a word. A lot of people said I was beautiful, which was news to me. They didn't seem to know what was different about me, just that I looked good. I got the modeling job for the summer and used at least a third of what I made to replace my watch. Told my mother that someone had found mine in the library. I still have it, but I'm ashamed to put it on. I stopped wearing it when my father hit the bottle, and of course now I wear his.

"What will you think of all this, Castle? I've wanted to tell you for a long time, but I'm a coward. More to the point, I'm a fraud. You tell me I'm gorgeous, but you wouldn't if I had my old nose. I hope you'd call me noble, though. At least now you know what I did, and that I regret it. I've had my 'new' nose for so long that I'm almost never aware of it, but if our baby inherits mine, at least you'll know its origin."

As she folds three sheets and puts them in another envelope, she feels lighter. Unburdened. The untouched tea is cold. She gathers up the two envelopes and the mug and goes downstairs. Just as she pours the tea into the sink, the front door opens and Castle comes straight into the kitchen.

"Hey, my lagomorph," she says, giving him a kiss. "How are your teeth? All sparkly?"

"Take a look," he replies, smiling widely and holding it. "I bet I could have a vet clean my teeth. Did you know rabbits and humans have the same number of teeth?"

"Do tell, Castle."

"Twenty-eight. Well, twenty-eight for humans like me who've had their wisdom teeth pulled. Rabbits and humans have more in common than most people might think. Plus if I went to the vet instead of the dentist I'd probably get a carrot for a reward. Nada from the dentist."

"I'll give you a better reward than that."

"Like right now? Because I think I know what kind of reward you have in mind. One of the best things about your second trimester. You have sex on the brain."

"And you don't?"

"Of course, but you really, really do."

"Well, right now I'm going for a walk. I need to get out for a bit."

"Hang on, I'll come with you."

She puts her hand on his arm. "No, just me."

"Is something wrong?" His face is already white. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I promise. Come here a minute." She wraps herself around him and kisses him deeply, and then more deeply, all tongue and teeth.

"God, Beckett, you can't go out now. Please." He's panting.

"Consider that a promissory note, Castle. I want to give you something." She reaches behind her and picks up one of the envelopes. "This is for you. It was really hard for me to write and I don't want to be here when you read it."

The color that had flooded back into his face is gone again. "What's in here? Something's wrong."

"Nothing's wrong except that I'm a coward. I used up all my courage writing that, okay? But I'll be back in an hour."

Before he has the wits to stop her, she's out the door and in the elevator. He sits at the kitchen counter and is about the open the envelope when he stands back up. "Maybe I need a drink while I read this," he says, and shakes his head. He walks to his office, pours himself a Scotch, and sits down. When he finishes the letter he reads it again, and then again.

"Oh, Kate," he says. He's crying.

TBC

 **A/N** Thank you so much for your continued support of this story. It helps counteract the hideous gloom that surrounds _Castle_ for me at the moment.


	7. Chapter 7

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

He fights the impulse to run out into the street, find her and bring her home, because he doesn't know where she is. He could try, could follow one of her favorite routes, but if he misses her and she comes back and finds no one here? That's a prospect too awful to contemplate. She already seems to think that he'll be appalled that she had her nose fixed and that she paid for it in part by selling her watch, so how would she interpret his absence? That he left in disgust?

No. Never.

So he'll stay. And wait. Oh, oh! There is one small thing he can do before she gets back. He races to the lobby, stopping only to ask the doorman to text him if Beckett returns before he does.

The florist directly opposite knows him well; they deliver a bouquet to the loft every week. "Afternoon, Rick," the manager says when his best customer, chest heaving and eyes red-rimmed, bursts through the door. "Everything all right?"

"Fine, it's fine, thank you, Milt," Castle says, breathing deeply a few times before he continues. "What kind of cut flowers do you have at the moment?"

"Well, roses, of course, and lilies. Tulips, lilacs—let me check." He turns to make a thorough examination of the refrigerated cases. "The first irises and some spectacular early peonies, too. Would you like me to make an arrangement of some kind?"

"No, I have kind of a weird request. Except for the roses, I'd like just one of each of those flowers, the best-looking one. Not in bud, but open already. And I'd like four roses, one each of red, pink, yellow, and white, please."

"Do you want a bouquet or—?"

"Just in a box, please. Nested in a box."

"Fine, this will just take a moment."

Castle often has trouble keeping still, but he's beyond jittery today. Bouncing on the ball of his feets, jingling the change in his pocket, dragging his hand through his hair, he looks towards his building every few moments to see if Beckett is approaching.

"Rick? Are these for delivery?"

Milt has the box on the counter with the lid tilted back so that Castle can see everything that the florist selected. "No, I'm taking them with me. For Kate. This is great, thanks so much. Could you put them on my account?"

"Of course. Here you go."

Castle tucks the long, white box under his arm and runs back across Broome. He tells the doorman that texting him is no longer necessary, and rides the elevator home. Beckett has been gone for 45 minutes, and he's worried that she might stay out longer than she'd said just to delay facing him. He needs to do something. Coffee. She'd had tea at breakfast but she's allowed a latte once a day. He'll make her his best, and his best is really, truly impressive. Beckett likes to say that if he gets sick of writing he could get a job as a baristo. There are days when he considers it.

He hears her footstep when she opens the door, and he's there by the time she's dropping her bag on the table. One look at her face and he's having to fight tears again, but he hugs her as hard as and as long as he can before he whispers, "Come with me."

"Where?" she asks against his chest.

"Just come." He takes her hand and pulls her to the sofa. "Sit down. I'll be right back." He gets her mug and the box of flowers and puts them on the coffee table.

"Mmm, thank you," she says, after her first sip. She makes a noise that would bring him to his knees if he weren't already on them, on the floor right next to her. Her head is bowed and she doesn't look up as she clears her throat. "Did you read it?" Her question is almost inaudible. "My letter?"

"I did." He nods, opens the box and takes out the first flower, a branch of sweetly fragrant lilac. "See this, Kate?"

"Yes." Is she supposed to say something else?

"What do you think?"

"It's beautiful."

He puts it down and picks up a golden yellow tulip with dark orange piping. "What about this?" His voice is as gentle as she's ever heard it.

"Um, lovely."

"And this?" He holds up the white rose and rests it against her wrist. She can feel the petals against her pulse.

"It's beautiful, too." Is this some kind of a test? It feels like torture, even though his tone, his expression, and his body language are so gentle.

The fat, frilly peony is next. This time he says nothing, just holds it in his hand, extending it to her.

"It's perfect, Castle. Is that what you want me to say? I don't understand what you're asking, or not asking? These flowers, all of them, are gorgeous."

He inches close to her and takes her face in his hands. "That's what you're supposed to say. That they're gorgeous. They're perfect." He stops briefly to control his voice, which is in danger of quavering. "They're examples of the perfection of nature. But the difference between flowers and us is that we're never perfect in nature. We all have flaws, perceived or not. And here's what I know, even without evidence: that you in nature, with your imperfect nose, were more beautiful than these perfect flowers. And you are too, now. There's no difference to me. The only thing that upsets me is how miserable you must have been to do what you did, and how unhappy it makes you to look back on it. If our baby grows up to have your nose, I'm going to make sure it understands the nobility of it."

He pulls back and turns slightly to get another flower from the box. "Smell this, Kate" he says, passing her the lily. "Isn't it amazing?"

"Yeah." She's having a hard time with her voice, too.

"See? You can smell it. Your nose still works fine, even without the bump, so what's to miss? Now, come with me, I have something else I want to show you." He takes her hand again, but this time walks her into their bathroom. "Stand right here," he says, pulling her to a spot directly in front of the mirror over the sink. He moves behind her and covers her nose with the palm of his left hand. "Can't see your nose, can you?"

"No." She's watching him watch her.

"It doesn't matter to me what's under there. It could be a tiny turn-up thing or a schnoz like Klinger's on _M*A*S*H_. It could be the nose that comes with the roll of the genetic dice, or one you chose yourself. I don't care." Without taking his eyes off her in the mirror, he slowly unbuttons her shirt—his shirt, which she's taken to wearing since she can't fit into any of hers—with one hand and tosses it towards the hamper. His face disappears when he buries it in her hair, and he uses both hands to draw her tank top over her head, tantalizingly slowly, before throwing it in the direction of the shirt.

Her eyes are still locked on his reflection, but she's beginning to shiver. When he moves slightly to kiss her on the back of the neck, pushing aside one satiny bra strap and then the other, her shivering escalates to trembling. He unhooks her bra and she hears it land with a faint whoosh on top of the shirts, but she still can't see his face. He's running his tongue behind her right ear now, and she has to grab the edge of the counter to hold herself up. Her eyelids are sinking and she feels as it her knees are about to do the same.

"Your breasts are so beautiful," he says, his breath warm against her shoulder. "Look, Kate. Open your eyes." He has moved his head up next to hers, and he's cradling her breasts with his enormous, soft hands. "They look completely different from the way they did a few months ago," he says, as he lightly touches his thumb to her right nipple and uses his other to stroke the side of her left breast.

"Uhhhh, bigger," she manages to say.

He can't help chuckling a little. "True, but that's not what I meant. Not entirely. But Kate, your skin is translucent. Everything about you right now is luminous. You know what I really love? This." With the tips of his fingers he starts tracing the veins that have become evident on her breasts. His voice is very low now, and seductive. "It's like a map, a roadmap of your body. We change all the time, we never stop, but the way you're changing now is magical. And then there's this." He pushes her yoga pants to her ankles, and she summons the wits to move her feet just enough so that he can get her pants all the way off. She's completely naked and his hands are resting on either side of her belly; she's desperate to grab them and move them back up where they had been, but she hasn't the strength.

"Your belly is so hard now," he murmurs as he massages the underside of it. "It was before you were pregnant, too, because you're so incredibly fit, but this is a different kind of hard and it's such a contrast to this—" he moves his left hand back over a breast—"and this." He runs his right hand along the inside of her thigh and begins to caress it. "So soft. You're so, so soft, Kate." He slides his hand up and makes ten lubricious syllables out of "and warm, and wet." This time her knees do buckle, but he's ready: he catches her and scoops her into his arms.

"You'd better," she moans, her head rolling against his collarbone. "You'd better be taking me to bed, Castle."

For a woman who seemed incapable of anything only ten seconds ago, she now has the strength of a streak of tigers. No sooner has he laid her gently on the bed than she grabs him by the front of his shirt, yanks him down, rolls him onto his back and straddles him. She's simultaneously kissing him and trying to undress him. "Help me," she says. "Help me or I'll rip these eight-hundred dollar pants right off you and turn them into dust cloths. And hurry up because I'm ready, way beyond ready, and it's all your doing."

"Right, right, right." He wriggles out of his clothes. "I'm ready."

"I'll say," she says, and smiles for the first time in hours.

Much later, they're still in bed, drifting in and out of sleep and conversation. "Beckett?" Castle asks the top of her head, which is resting on his chest.

"Mmhmm."

"I'm sorry that you carried that around for so long. All that pain and remorse. I wish you'd told me before."

She rolls onto her side and props herself up on one elbow. "I couldn't. I just couldn't, until now. I realized that the only way I could was to write it in a letter to you." She looks into his eyes. "Thanks for still doing this, Castle," she says, running the tip of her index finger down his nose. "It feels good, doesn't it?"

"It does."

"You won't stop, will you? Even though this isn't my original nose?"

"Even if you get back your old nose. I promise."

"Not getting the old one back. I'm used to this one now."

"Good. We're about to have a baby. There's only so much change I can handle at once."

TBC

 **A/N** _Castle_ ends in fifteen days, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not ready for that change _at all_.


	8. Chapter 8

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

She's dozing, which she's been doing a lot lately because she's hugely pregnant and can't sleep comfortably for any length of time. She drifts off three or four times a day, often in unexpected places. For lunch he'd made a huge salad and in the time it took him to warm some rolls in the microwave she'd fallen asleep sitting at the table, holding a fork in her hand. She's officially on maternity leave now, so she can keep odd hours and it doesn't matter.

They're in the middle of a debilitating, record-breaking heat wave, and he keeps suggesting that they go to the Hamptons where she could at least stand in the pool or wade in the ocean to cool off, but she refuses. One, she's nesting; two, she's terrified of going into labor when she's not within a few minutes' ride of both her doctor and the hospital.

"I may be a furnace, Castle," she had said last night, "but I'm keeping the home fires burning. And don't say anything about mixed metaphors or whatever. I'm hot."

"Of course you're hot. You've been hot since the day I met you."

"Shut up."

"Okay."

So here they are in the loft, for the duration, with the air conditioning set to Arctic.

He has always loved watching her sleep, but never more so than now. He wishes that she could see herself or at least understand how beautiful she is. She's flat on her back in their bed, wearing a wisp of a cotton nightgown that reaches the middle of her thighs. Her hair has come out of its ponytail and is spread across the pillow; one strand is stuck to her cheek and he's surprised that it's not tickling her awake. He takes a photo and hopes the click won't disturb her. It doesn't.

So many things are in his mind right now; some are chasing each other like puppies in the grass, some are moving around slowly and deliberately, and others are just sitting. One thing breaks loose to tell him that this is the perfect time to write her a letter. He hasn't done that in months. He tiptoes to his desk, gets a legal pad and his fountain pen, and comes back to the bedroom, where he positions an armchair so that he can sit and see Kate in full profile.

"Do you remember years ago my asking you the French word for pregnant? You told me that it's _enceinte_. I still can't say it like a native, as you do, but even in my bad accent it's gorgeous. Not as gorgeous as you, though. Nowhere near. And gorgeous as _enceinte_ is, the word that's buzzing in my ear at this moment is gravid. You're gravid. I love it because it conveys not just 'pregnant' but 'full of meaning,' which is exactly what you are, in every way I can imagine. Full of meaning.

"I'm writing this while you're sleeping. It's dog-days-of-summer awful, and I'm trying to put myself in your place. I can see your belly rise and fall as you breathe, and when I see a ripple in your skin when the baby's moving I still gasp, even after all these months. BG doesn't move as much as before since there's not as much room in there now, but it still amazes me.

"What can it be like to have your body change almost daily? The only thing I can compare it to is growing a beard or growing my hair, or thinking about how my stomach looks after I've eaten way more than I should have. But that's just small-scale outward appearance and it's not in the same universe at all. I've never really asked you exactly what it feels like _inside_. You'll say, 'Your kid is treating me like we're in the ring at Gold's Gym,' but I want more. I want little things. I want nuances. When you're awake I'm going to ask you for every detail, before the baby gets here and before you forget any of it. Haven't you thought it strange that I never extracted that information from you? Me, the guy who wants to know every single detail about every single thing? The wonder of seeing and feeling you change has been enough for me. But now it isn't. Not nearly enough. I can never know enough about you, Kate."

He caps his pen, folds the paper in three, and puts it on the table next to him. He needs some water and she will, too, so he tiptoes to the kitchen and picks up two bottles, a bowl of fruit, and a plate of cookies that she's taken a fancy to in the last week. When he comes back, she's stirring, and a minute later she's rolling onto her right side and opening her eyes to look at him.

"Is that watermelon with mint and lime juice in that bowl?" she asks groggily.

"It is."

"Are those Sonia's Ginger Thins?"

"They are."

"Thanks for getting them. Zactly what I want."

"I knew you would. I can read you like a book."

"I _am_ a book, Castle."

"You're several books. And more to come." He notices her inching over to the side of the bed. "You want some help getting up?"

"Yes, thank you. Gotta go to the bathroom."

She waddles back a few minutes later—and she truly is waddling now—and stands in front of him. "Good thing we didn't go to the beach."

"Yeah, why's that?"

"I could have been harpooned."

"Really?"

"Really. I'm a whale."

"Not much longer." Oops.

"So you agree? I'm a whale."

"No, just saying you're a great catch."

"Not a bad save, Castle. Almost a save."

"You want a cookie?"

"No, my phone. Or yours. Where is it?"

He's a little confused. She doesn't want a cookie, which she'd just been eying lustfully? And she wants to call someone? He fishes his cell out of his back pocket. There's no accounting, but he's not going to ask. "Here you go."

She's standing there in her little nightie and scanning the contacts list. She looks serious. No, not serious. Sort of determined, maybe? It's an expression he has never seen on her before, and he's seen thousands. Well, hundreds, anyway. She has a very expressive face. Eyes. Especially eyes.

"Hi, it's Kate Beckett. I'm wondering if I should come in? Talk to her, anyway." She's silent for a bit. "Right. Well, my water just broke, so I figure this baby is on the way." She's silent again. "Good. Thanks. Yes, I'm home. I'll wait for her to call me. Bye."

If he had been hit with 50,000 volts from a Taser, leapt out of the way of a runaway M21 bus, or suddenly been given the legs of Javier Sotomayor, he couldn't have jumped higher or faster than he does when he hears "my water just broke." Kate's holding the phone and he's hugging her as tightly as he can, given her 274-day frontal addition.

He's trying not to shout. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"This is why. I need you to be calm. I'm trying to be calm."

"You didn't have any warning, right? Fifteen percent of pregnant women have no warning about their water breaking. That's what I read. So there's no reason to be alarmed. Right? Don't be alarmed."

"I'm not alarmed. I just want the doctor to call me back."

She gets her wish: the phone rings, but it's not the one that's sandwiched between them, which is Castle's. The OB/GYN is calling Beckett's, which is on her nightstand. Castle lets go of his wife, stumbles to her side of the bed, and grabs the phone. "Doctor Gerard, hold on hold on hold on, please. Here's Kate." He thrusts it at her with an unsteady hand.

He watches her as she talks to the doctor, asking questions and answering some in return. He doesn't get half of what she's saying. They've been talking for half an hour, at least. Has to be. Should this be taking so long? Shouldn't they just be leaving for the hospital right this instant? He goes to the closet, picks up Kate's bag which has been packed for two weeks, and runs to leave it by the front door. Where are his car keys? Why aren't they here? He can't trust a cab driver. Wait, he'll call a town car. No, where the fuck are the keys? Oh. Here. In the bowl.

"Castle?" She's calling him. Must need him to help her. He races back. She's sitting in the chair he'd been in.

"Do you need me to carry you? I can carry you."

"I need to sit down. Or lie down, something. I'm not in labor yet."

"So it's not time to go?"

"No. Geez, you've been through this before, you know how it works."

"I don't. Not really. Meredith had an elective, scheduled C section, so I don't know anything."

"Okay, fine. But listen, Mister Internet, you've read everything on this so you know the drill."

"That's the problem, I know too much."

"Don't have to tell me. I'm the one who caught you reading 'Delivery Room Horror Stories.' You should have stopped when I told you."

"I did."

"And when you thought I wasn't looking you went right back and finished. Look, I'm just going to walk around a bit, okay?"

"Walk around? Are you crazy? It's a hundred degrees with humidity to match. You'll keel over before you get to the corner of Crosby Street. Very unhealthy. Very, very."

"I meant walk around the loft, Castle. The loft. Okay? Look, would you make me some toast?"

He can't believe she wants to eat a time like this. "Toast?"

"Yes. Carbs. Very good in early stages of labor."

"You just said you weren't in labor."

"Well, I'm probably about—ohh, God." She's gripping her belly with both hands. "Uhhhh."

"Kate?"

"I am. I'm in labor. I want that toast, though."

She walks, he frets. She's having contractions, but they're still far apart. They both eat some toast, and an hour and a half later, some yogurt. "I think we should lie down for a while. Try to get some sleep."

"I don't think I can sleep, Kate."

"Fine. You're not the one who has to push a giant object through a small opening, so maybe you don't need to save your strength, but I do."

She's gone to the bathroom to brush her teeth and is about to get into bed when she notices the yellow paper next to the armchair. "Castle? Did you write me a letter?"

He's brushed his teeth, too, and has stripped down to his boxers and tee shirt. He'd completely forgotten about it. "I did. While you were asleep. Before."

She smiles the smile that would melt him if he weren't already. "May I read it?"

"Sure. Of course. It's for you."

Propping the flimsy paper against her belly, she reads it twice before turning her head to him and lacing her fingers through his. "Gorgeous, huh?"

"Gorgeousest."

"Gravid."

"Gravidest."

She holds his gaze for a long time and then squeezes his hand. "Guess I'd better give you the details, huh? The nuances. Ohhh, oh, God." She squeezes a lot harder. His fingers are numb. "Wow." She's breathing hard. "Nuances. I'd better be fast. Gotta tell you before the baby gets here, right?"

"No. It's okay. You're working hard now. Not important. It's not important. Shouldn't we be calling the doctor, Kate?"

"Not yet. I'll tell you, believe me. Just going to make a note of the time."

"Ten minutes since the last one. You really want to keep going with this?"

"Yeah. I do. I do. So. What it feels like inside is probably just what you can imagine, even though you're not a woman. You have a fantastic imagination. And you can, uh, you can put your self in other people's shoes, and in their skins, better than almost anyone on earth. What it is, for me? It's a surprise."

She's quiet again. He hopes that she's not bracing for another contraction, it's much too soon. This time he's the one who's squeezing a hand, but gently.

"Not what you expected to be doing while I'm in labor, huh?"

"True. I figured I'd be feeding you ice chips and mopping your face while you made horrifying, unrepeatable threats against me."

"Still might. Don't get too relaxed. Whoo." She takes a deep breath. "It's a surprise every day. When I was little I didn't play with dolls. I wasn't one of those girls who always dreamed about having kids. When my Mom was killed, any nascent mothering instinct that I might have had was buried with her." She stops to clear her throat, and take a sip of water. "And then I fell in love with you. Even after we'd been together for a while I didn't think about having children, not the way I know you did. All the time. But I didn't reject the idea, either. Remember my saying I wasn't a baby person?"

"Vividly."

"That was the truth. I wasn't. But the more I fell in love with you, the more I got so I didn't mind entertaining the idea, vaguely. But there was always an excuse, a reason, not to plan it. And then it happened, by accident. I still think it was on Thanksgiving. I'm sure that I got pregnant on Thanksgiving night. The timing is right, and I want it to be, because I've never been so thankful. But it's still a surprise. I don't mean it's a surprise because we didn't plan it, but because I never thought anything could make me this happy. Even at the beginning, when I was throwing my guts up every day. Even now when I can't sleep and I'm cranky and I can't wear heels and I can't work and I have no concentration and I'm hot all the time, I'm so surprised. Surprised that I can love being this way. Surprised that I can love a person I haven't met yet and don't even know if all this love I have is for a daughter or a son. Surprised that I'm not terrified. Surprised that I'm so peaceful. Surprised that I haven't had this baby yet and I'm already thinking about our next one."

He's having trouble processing all of this, finding it almost impossible not to stop her and kiss her through every contraction and never let go, but it's the last sentence that tips him over. That she's already thinking about having another baby. And he starts to cry. To bawl like a baby.

TBC

 **A/N** One chapter to go. Thank you all for being so welcoming to this story. It helps take away some of the sting.


	9. Chapter 9

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

An hour later—twelve minutes according to Castle's watch, which he's sure must need a new battery, even though he'd replaced it last month—Kate had called the doctor to confirm that she should come to the hospital, and he had called the car service. He'd not been happy to find out that his regular driver had just had emergency dental surgery and was not available. "It'll probably be some guy who doesn't know Brooklyn from the Bronx. And he'll be on his cell all the time."

"Castle, stop fretting," she says, patting his arm. "Whoever they send will be fine."

And so it is that the two of them are sitting together on the back seat of a town car, her bag stowed safely in the trunk, and creeping along a clogged street in lower Manhattan. Construction projects all over the area have made the narrow thoroughfare even narrower; excessive heat is making maniacs of people who are typically mild-mannered behind the wheel. The driver, who knows exactly how the lights are timed along this route, sees an opportunity to make some headway and guns the motor to get through an intersection.

 _Boom! Thunka-thunka-thunk!_

"What the hell?" Castle shouts, as the car lurches and his wife looks wild-eyed but says nothing as she crushes his hand inside hers.

The driver pulls hard to the left. "Blowout. Flat tire."

"No. No." Kate is gritting her teeth. "No. Not possible." The car is tilting sharply, indicating that the flat tire is way more than possible.

"Hold on," Castle says, in his most reassuring voice. "Driver? How long will it take to fix?"

"Maybe fifteen minutes? Twenty? You gotta get out, though."

"Out?"

"Yeah, out. Like not in. All passengers must exit the vehicle. 's a company rule."

"Have you noticed that one of the passengers in your vehicle is in labor?"

"Yes, sir. I did notice."

"It's about a thousand degrees. She can't stand out there. She can't really stand anywhere right now."

" 's only a hundred one," the driver replies, waving a hand feebly at the dashboard.

Castle yanks his phone from his pocket and makes a call from his favorites list. "Ryan? It's Castle. Beckett's in labor and the town car we're in just had a flat. Nightmare. Total freaking nightmare. Is there a squad car in the vicinity that can take us to the hospital?"

"Hang on, I'll check. Where are you exactly?"

Castle gives him their location and Kate half glares. "Shouldn't be using the cops for this."

"Yes, we should. This is exactly what we should be doing." He puts up his hand and points to his phone. "What? That's great. Less than two minutes? I'm sure we can wait in here until then. Thanks a million, Ryan." He rests the cell on his thigh. "Driver? A police car is a couple of blocks away. We're not getting out until it arrives and drives us to Mount Sinai West."

Almost immediately a police car approaches in full lights-and-sirens mode and comes to a stop. The grinning officer next to the driver gets out to help.

"Hastings?" a surprised Beckett says.

"I heard the call when I was on break in the diner across the street, so I swapped out with Officer Kim. Had to be here for this one. We women cops gotta stick together."

"Right," Beckett says as cheerfully as she can when a contraction is about to take over her body. "NYPD Sisterhood rocks."

Hastings and Castle maneuver her into the back before running around the car to get in their respective seats. "This come with a supersonic siren?" he asks anxiously as he looks at the sweat beading on his wife's face.

"Something better," Hastings says, reaching for the remote next to her. Her amplified voice, giving stern instructions to everyone on the road ahead of them, blares from a loudspeaker between the flashing roof lights. Cars begin getting out of the way as if they're the Red Sea parting before Moses.

At the hospital, an aide puts Kate into a wheelchair. "Doctor Gerard, please," Castle says. "We're seeing, she's seeing Doctor Gerard. In maternity. We're having a baby, I mean she's having a baby but it's mine, too. Not Doctor Gerard, my wife. My wife is having the baby."

"I think he's got it, Castle," she says, looking up at her already rumpled spouse.

By the time she's in bed in her hospital gown, well into labor, he's a wreck. "You know what I was thinking?" she asks during a lull in the action.

"What? What do you need? Did I forget something?"

"No, it's that I didn't forget something and I'm glad." She's looking in the direction of her feet. "I got my legs waxed day before yesterday. Smart, right?"

"Oh, so so so smart," he yelps in relief. "Yes! I hope the baby has your brains."

"If it's a boy he probably won't ever need to think about that."

"True. Wait, you think it's a boy?"

"Just an observation, Castle. We'll know pretty sooooooo. Agggh!"

"Breathe, breathe, atta girl. Pretty soon."

"Oh, God, it hurts. Why the hell does anybody do this?"

"Because it's worth it at the end, Kate."

"Easy for you to say. In a better world men would be forced to do this. Holy sh—."

He tries to push her hair off her forehead. "It's okay, it's fine. Baby's almost here."

"IT IS NOT ALMOST HERE! If it were almost here Doctor Gerard would be with us saying things like, 'There's the head.' But she's not. Tell your baby to get out of me now, Castle, or I swear I will somehow get off this godforsaken bed and throttle you."

That's quite a threat, he thinks, unconsciously lifting a hand protectively to his throat. "Right." He risks leaning over and putting his mouth about an inch above Kate's stomach. "Listen, BG, your mother needs you to make a big push right now, like if you were underwater and saw this cool tunnel right in front of you, you'd use your flippers to zoom right through it to the other side."

"Flippers? The baby has feet, Castle, feet. Not flippers."

"Right." He'll agree with whatever she says. He meant flippers as in swim fins, but he's not going to go back for an explanation. "Of course. Sorry, feet."

"Kid's not moving. This is your fault, Castle. It's not moving like you don't move if you don't feel like it, which is a lot of the time."

"You're right, and I apologize for my sloth gene."

"Sloths are little. If I were giving birth to a sloth it would a hell of a lot easier to deliver. It would already be out."

"You'd also have been pregnant for only four months. That's the gestation period for a sloth."

"Castle?"

"Yes?"

"Shut up about the freaking sloths and how they hardly have to be pregnant at all."

"Would you like something to drink?"

"NO."

"Okay."

In the aftermath of the next contraction, Kate smiles at him. "I'm sorry I told you you're a dead man. You know I love you."

"And I love you."

Until four minutes later when she says she will do him bodily harm if he ever again says he wants to have sex with her. He wonders if that falls under the category of tough love.

And then, finally, things speed up dramatically, and there's Doctor Gerard between Kate's legs, saying all sorts of encouraging and helpful things that he wishes he could write down but can't, and there's a whole phalanx of people in the room with them, looking professional. Thank God. The first thing he sees is what a mop of hair the baby has, and then the shoulders, already looking capable of bearing the world, and then he's in such a delirious state that he almost doesn't register the doctor saying, "It's a girl. A gorgeous girl."

And there she is, slippery as the little swimmer he'd been talking to just a little while ago, squirming on her mother's chest. "Oh, Castle, look at her. Look. Hello, little one. Hello. Welcome to the big world. That's your daddy, right there. He loves you. I love you." She puts her hand on her daughter's back. "I love you, Castle. Thank you for her."

"Thank you for her, Kate," he says, first kissing his wife and then the baby. "I love you more than you'll ever know."

"Oh, I know." She gives him a huge, watery smile.

The doctor asks him to cut the cord, and then suggests he go give everyone the news while they clean Kate up.

"Castle?"

"I'll be back in a few minutes."

"I left you something in your inside jacket pocket."

"You did? Okay."

He knows that he should go to the waiting room and tell Jim, Alexis, and his mother, but he wants to see what Kate left him first. He fetches his jacket from the small locker where he'd stashed it earlier in the day, looks in the pocket, and finds a pale gray envelope. He sits down, hard, on a hard chair, and his hands are shaking. She wrote him a letter. It takes him a moment to take the paper out, and open it. There's a date on the top. Today's date. What?

"It's three in the morning and you're sound asleep. Probably the last good night's sleep you'll get for months. I have a feeling that the baby's arriving today. Not just a feeling, I'm sure of it. You know I put no stock in horoscopes, but I thought I'd go on line to see who was born on August 25th. Here are my favorites. Gene Simmons, not just because I always kind of liked KISS, but because we met him on a case. _That_ case. The one where I almost came to your room and got into bed with you. And then there's Leonard Bernstein, one of the best people who ever made music, in every way. And he lived in New York! Althea Gibson, a tennis player I worshipped from the first time I saw something about her on television, the first person of color ever to win a Grand Slam tournament. The Jackie Robinson of tennis, people called her. And for you? Bret Harte! He grew up here, too. Did you know he published his first work when he was 11? Even earlier than you, Castle. I saved the best for last: Allen Pinkerton. Yup, the man who basically created the world of the private detective. So I'm hoping that our child will have not just our genetic material, but a little bit of the creativity and determination of all these people who have the same birthday.

"I don't put stock in horoscopes, but I do put stock in the lifelong importance of certain days. The day you and I met, even though I wanted to throw you out on your arrogant ass; the day I knew that I was in love with you; the day we finally managed to get married; the day I found out I was pregnant, and now this. This day. Could it be any better than this? You know about parenthood, you've lived with it for a very long time. It's new to me, but I feel as though I learned everything I really need to know, everything that's important—okay, I still suck at diapering, but I'm determined to master the skill—by watching you. Not just with Alexis or even Cosmo, but with every little creature I've ever seen bump into you, pull on the hem of your shirt, ask you a question, even the kid who threw up on you in the lobby of the movie theater last year.

"Our big new adventure starts today Castle. An adventure that for so long I thought I had no interest in, and now I know how wrong I was. If I'm half as good a mother as you are a father, I'll be proud. I love you madly. So: ready, set, go."

He cries so hard while he's reading it that he has to go back twice to make sure that he didn't miss anything. He pulls himself together and puts the letter back in his pocket, smiling at the realization that it's resting on top of his heart. In the men's room, he splashes water on his face, then goes out to the waiting room to announce the safe and happy arrival of the newest member of the Castle-Beckett family. He spends a few minutes extolling the virtues of his minutes-old daughter and then excuses himself to get back to Kate. "Don't leave! I'll be back to get you soon."

When he opens the door to the room, Kate is sitting up in bed, cuddling the baby. "She already nursed, Castle! She's a natural. It was amazing. Hurt like hell, but it was amazing."

He kisses her with as much love as he's ever had. "I got your letter," he whispers. "I can't believe you wrote it today. Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"I have something for you, too."

"You write me a letter?"

"Nope, something else." He reaches into his pocket, takes out a slim box, and offers it to her.

"Will you hold her while I open that?"

"With the greatest daddyish pleasure." He scoops up the baby expertly, and sits on the edge of the bed with her, his eyes on Kate.

"Oh!" She removes the diamond and emerald bracelet and holds it up to catch the light. "Oh, Castle, it's exquisite."

"I got emeralds because they're green. G for girl."

"What if the baby had been a boy, Castle?"

"I might have another bracelet with diamonds and sapphires. You know, sapphires are blue. B for boy."

She leans into him and kisses him back, then puts her hand softly on the baby's head. "And would that bracelet happen to be in your pocket?"

"It would. I'm saving it for the next time."

 **A/N** Thank you for joining me on this epistolary trip. Extra thanks to all who reviewed, anonymously or not, or PMed me. You're a fantastic bunch of readers. I hope to be back next week with a new story.


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